Re: gnome-config problems

[Mark Galassi <rosalia cygnus com>]

    ketil> Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:
    >> What is your point?  SGML is *very* hard to parse correctly.
    >> Scheme is trivial in comparison.

    ketil> While I agree on Scheme's parsability, the question of
    ketil> parsing SGML is in reality a solved one, since there are
    ketil> freeware packages that do it.  Or you could use XML, which
    ketil> is vastly simpler.

That's not quite correct.  None of the SGML parsers are clean code
ready to be used as a library with a nice API.  You could try to steal
code from SP and Jade, but when Ulrich Drepper tried to do that he
decided it was too much of a pain, so he is an SGML parsing library
himself (which will be offered as an extension to Guile, with most of
the library written in Scheme).

On top of that, while you might define your own DTD for SGML config
files, you would then have to also interpret semantics when you parse
the config file.  With an embedded Scheme interpreter that's done more
easily.

    ketil> An advantage of using Scheme is that you could get a
    ketil> programming language in there, you could put a cond in your
    ketil> config file, which is a lot harder to do with SGML.

That is the reason Scheme is the right way to go for this.  Just think
of emacs lisp.  People a bit scared of Scheme can use GUI front ends.