XML: Can the Desperate Perl Hacker Do It?
Programming XML with Perl
By Michael Leventhal
Is Perl a suitable language for programming XML? This article will illustrate how Perl can be used with XML to check if an XML document is well-formed. The relative simplicity of the program demonstrates that lightweight Perl programs may be used with XML, although Unicode and the use of entities make it difficult for Perl programmers to handle some XML files.
Perl Meets XML
This article presents a little program written in Perl that checks the "well-formedness" of an XML document. The main purpose here is to show that Perl hackers can do it; that is, that little programs, utility scripts, and CGI stuff, can be hacked in Perl.
Java is very popular these days and while I do proclaim to like Java, it is also not terribly controversial to assert that Java is not a quick-and-dirty hacking language. It is also beyond the ken of most people who write computer programs, professional programmers being a minority within this group.
I think XML is going to become the ubiquitous standard for text encoding, and people a lot smarter than me have already said that -- so it stands a reasonable chance of being approximately true. Not only is Perl the preeminent, practically uncontested hacking language, but it is doubly preeminent in text hacking, where its regular-expression facilities outshine every competitor. People will hack: They will hack text, they will hack text encoding in XML, they will hack in Perl, they will hack XML in Perl.
