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Using xml.xpath question.

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.net
Mon Jul 14 12:31:10 EDT 2003 
hwlgw at hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) wrote in message news:<cb035744.0307110917.7459191b at posting.google.com>...
> 
> A very nice and helpful Paul Boddie in action on c.l.p.

Glad to be of some help. ;-)

> But OMFG!

Object Management F<something> Group?

> Here we see why we need a good *high* level XML library in
> the Python Standard Library.  The effbot is doing great work with
> elementtree at www.effbot.org, but he is doing that all alone.  I
> think a good high level XML library should have a very high priority
> for Python.

This is argued for a lot, but I don't really see total acceptance
until the PyXML people get on board. They seem to be managing well
enough, and whilst one might argue that the PyXML APIs are too
highbrow for the rest of the community, no-one using PyXML for serious
XML processing is going to adopt the mythical "Pythonic" API that
everyone is talking about unless it does the business for them as
well.

> It should be a much higher priority for the core Python developers
> than the extensions I have seen lately.  Booleans, bah!

I don't want to get dragged into another debate on core language
enhancements. :-) I suppose once Python 2.3 is released, we may well
see more focus on the libraries.

> And for instance, I hate it to make my code unreadable using list
> comprehensions and other syntactic sugar; and then later having to
> explain it to a C programmer.  "Ha!" she says, "You claimed the Python
> language reads like pseudocode!".  Geez.

Actually, list comprehensions are very readable... to a mathematician.
Seriously, though, I'm using them a lot more than map/filter/reduce
these days, but I can't see a real need for the language runtime to go
beyond generators for the time being, although I'll surely get branded
as being "short-sighted" for saying that.

Paul
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