[self-interest] Mango

[David Ungar]

Don,

Mango was based on a similar design done by Prof. Ole Lehrmann-Madsen for Beta.
It would built by Ole Agesen, who is now with VM-Ware (I'm not sure 
of the spelling) here in the bay area.

Your best bet might be to try to get ahold of either of these folks.
(The first Ole is at the University of Aarhus, in Denmark.)

- Dave


>Several years ago, I read a paper about a parser written in Self called
>Mango.
>Are there any more papers about Mango, or has any other research or
>development been done along those lines?
>It was a parser that created parse trees of nodes that dynamically inherited
>application specific behaviors.
>It solved the problem that people have with using XML through the DOM, since
>when you parse in a DOM tree, the nodes are all generic xml nodes, instead
>of domain specific classes, so the code you have to write to manipulate them
>is much more verbose, harder to follow, and less type safe, since it's going
>through the generic DOM interface, instead of an application defined
>interfaces appropriate for the particular nodes.
>Mango parsed in trees and made each node inherit from an application defined
>class, which is a very selfish thing to do, so I haven't seen the technique
>used in other systems based on languages like C++, that can't easily morph
>object inheritance aroud willy nilly like self.
>But it might be doable in Python.
>Some DOM-like interfaces have user data pointers on each of the nodes, that
>can point to "bicameral" application defined objects, but that's quite
>clumsy compared to the Mango approach.
>I would be interested in learning what eventually became of Mango, and about
>other parsers like that, implemented in any language. Thanks for any info!
>
>     -Don

-- 


     David Ungar
     Sun Microsystems Laboratories
     (650) 336-2618