[racket-dev] Transparent Structures in XML Library

Basically, I'm just suggesting that the xml package have sensible printing
of its structures. I can't imagine any case where you really want the
default printing of recursive structures of that complexity and potential
size to be the visible behavior.

Where it was annoying me was in my inference engine when I was doing
inference across very large xml documents. I have a trace feature in the
inference engine to trace assertions that is very useful for debugging
rules. You can imagine the output when I turned it on the first time with
one of the large xml documents. Literally, one assertion was 100+ pages.

I've pushed a new version of the inference engine that uses ~.s throughout.
So, at least it prints it reasonable. But, it is still continually walking
the structures and building a huge string (at least 10s of megabytes each at
the highest levels). And, it has to do that for every assertion in a trace.

At least I have a large memory machine with plenty of memory (and, thanks to
you guys, a 64-bit windows version), so it does run. It's just annoying.

On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Matthias Felleisen <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>wrote:

>
> Doug, does this concrete example concerning printing help:
>
> #lang racket/load
>
> (module a racket/base
>  (struct xml (bar) #:transparent)
>
>  (define x (xml "bar"))
>  (displayln x)
>
>  (provide (struct-out xml) x))
>
> (module b racket/base
>  (require 'a)
>
>  (struct my xml () #:property prop:custom-write (lambda (x p z) (displayln
> "<my xml>" p)))
>
>  (define y (my "bar"))
>
>  (displayln y))
>
> (require 'b)
>
>
>
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