[cl-xmlspam-devel] Some comments on cl-xmlspam

[Hans Huebner]

Hi,

 I have finally found the need to parse XML again and gave cl-xmlspam
a try.  Here are a few comments:

 - I could not get explicit matching of names with a namespace prefix
to work.  I'm sorry that I can't even give a clear description of what
the problem is, except that I tried "foo:bar" and :foo.bar both with
and without namespaces declared to match foo, but never found xmlspam
to match my elements.  Not specifying the namespace prefix works.
Bottom line:  Debugging is rather difficult
 - OPTIONAL-ATTRIBUTE is not documented
 - The lack of backtracking is a serious restriction
 - ATTRIBUTE (and ELEMENT, for what it is worth) should either check
that the argument is a string or keyword constant and bail out on
plain symbols or allow for the specification of variable element or
attribute names.
 - There should be a way to access the KLACKS source so that one can
use KLACKS calls to read attribute values (or to process some of the
XML using KLACKS)
 - The macro expansions quickly get rather large which will be a
problem for some compilers (SBCL tends to become very slow and
allocate huge amounts of memory with large macro expansions).  This is
not an issue that I have, but it is something that will propably
happen rather soon.

 Take all of this as constructive comments.  I might even fix the
problems myself if you (rog) don't plan to invest any more time in
xmlspam.

 Thanks!
 Hans