[racket] Test to disambiguate x-expression attributes vs. content?

The type of Xexpr is...
| AtomicContent
| (list* Symbol (option AttributeList) XexprList)

It sounds like you have one function F that you would like to give the
type "Xexpr -> Value", but you are having a problem when you apply it
to the AttributeList. You should have such a problem, because an
AttributeList is not an Xexpr, so your types are wrong.

In other words, if you want to recursively process an Xexpr, then you
need two functions, one for attribute lists and one for xexpr lists.

Finally, I find it convenient when automatically processing Xexprs to
ensure that xexpr-drop-empty-attributes is #f so that there is always
an attribute list and do:

(match xe
 [(list* tag attrs content) ....])



On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Matthew Butterick
<mb.list.acct at gmail.com> wrote:
> Consider an x-expression that represents an XML tag, so it has the general
> form
>
> '(tag ((attr-name "attr-value") ... ) content ...)
>
> The attributes or content might be omitted, of course.
>
> When I recursively process these expressions, I start by decomposing the
> x-expression into components:
>
> tag
> ((attr-name "attr-value") ... )
> (content ...)
>
> The problem that surfaces in a recursive-processing context is that the list
> of content might have the same form as an attribute expression, e.g.,
>
> ((field-1 "value-1") (field-2 "value-2"))
> ((p "some text") (p "some more text"))
>
> Is there a test I could use to reliably disambiguate between these two
> cases, short of creating a new struct for x-expressions? Seems like I'm
> overlooking some middle ground.
>
>
>
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-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93