There seem to have been various intermediate messages that I haven't
received, but my comments in brief:
> (1) we should try to get everything into whatever flavour of xml does
> the job. [...]
>
> I've be experimenting with Procsy (in Python) and it's no real hassle to
> write additional stuff but I think we'd probably make faster progress if
> it was in XML
Eh? It is already in XML -- that is, Procsy (currently) reads prosynth-
flavoured XML files. John, can you clarify?
[From an earlier message of Mark H's:]
>>> I would like to hear someone describe what the disadvantages of
>>> changing to ProXML are.
As I see it they are (i) the time taken, (ii) the lack of functionality
(more below), (iii) the danger of hidden "traps" -- technical or
other problems with the re-write that might come to light half-way down
the road. Obviously this applies to any piece of coding, but perhaps
more acutely to one with sharp time constraints and in a deliberately
limited language. And (iv) rules written directly in ProXML, or any
programming language, might look even more unattractive to a linguist
than the current Procsy rules.
Functionality: ProXML is an elegant language for changing values of
attributes on an XML file with a reasonable amount of computational
power. But that's not what Procsy does, and the most obvious things
it currently does that ProXML can't easily handle are:
reading in other files (the .x file)
examining the next node in sequence of a particular type
(used in current Procsy rules like "if SEG+1: NAS is Y then ...")
building up a data structure for output
writing out a structured file at the end of processing
(other than the XML file itself, with changed attributes)
I'm not in the department till Thursday so can't look at ProXML as
I write this, but, as I think I discussed with MarkH, the best I
can think of for writing Procsy in ProXML at present would include
lots of instructions like
output "set f1 at 442 to 1000"
output "insert f0 from 200 to 220"
which would processed separately in another language -- most simply
by feeding them to the existing Python version of Procsy. (Which
wouldn't be entirely self-contained.)
Mark
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