Mark W - have I misunderstood? - I thought the discussion was about the
pros and cons of recoding Procsy *from* Python *into* ProXml.
best
John
On Mon, 27 Nov 2000 11:18:20 +0000 (GMT) M.A.Wainwright@damtp.cam.ac.uk
(Mark Wainwright) wrote:
>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
John Local
British Academy Reader
Professor of Phonetics and Linguistics
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
Tel 01904 432658
E-mail lang4@york.ac.uk
URL http://www.york.ac.uk/~lang4
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