[Info-vax] Any Way to Pass Arrays of Strings from C to Basic?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2019-11-07, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> On 11/7/2019 11:40 AM, seasoned_geek wrote:
>> The only portion which
>> needed to be in C was the piece which originally called Xerces XML
>> parser which was, at the time heavily supported by IBM. There was a
>> correct decision all XML parsing should be done by an industry
>> standard library.
>
> A while back we looked at several XML parsers.  When done looking, we 
> looked at each other and basically said WTF?  The products would test 
> some XML for matching tag pairs, but nothing else we could see.  One 
> thing they didn't do was parse out the actual data that we needed. 
> That, we still had to custom program.  Have to wonder just what these 
> bloatware products are good for?  Nothing we could see or justify.
>
> Note, perhaps there may be products that actually extract your data, but 
> we never saw one.
>

Are you sure you are not confusing a XML validator with a XML parser ?

There are two basic types of XML parser I am aware of.

The first one, the SAX style parser, calls back into a handler you
declare when an event (such as tag start seen, text seen, etc) occurs
during parsing.

The second one, the DOM style parser, parses the entire XML document
at once and places it in a DOM style tree which you can then pull
bits out of as required.

BTW, I don't know DEC Basic. Can you _directly_ call into a DEC BASIC
function from a C language routine and if so, are there limits on
what can be passed from the C routine into the DEC BASIC routine ?

If there are not, then I don't see why you can't just use one of
the various C language SAX parsers and register your BASIC function
as the callback handler if you didn't want to bother with one of
the DOM style parsers.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.