[Expat-discuss] is expat a reentrant parser

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Michael B. Allen writes:
 > I recall seeing a message by James Clark that it is indeed reentrant
 > but unforunately I don't remember where. This could have been changed
 > of course. The sourceforge code is considerably different from Clark's
 > original expat-1.2 source.

  I would not expect that quality of the code to have changed
terribly, so I'll say that it *should* still hold.  However, I've not
analyzed it for that, and don't expect that I'll have time to do so.
  I suspect that it's also re-entrant using the thread-safe definition
of re-entrancy, but again, have not done a serious analysis of it.
  It would be great for someone to do the analysis, but I don't think
I'll have the time.  If anyone can say that these forms of re-entrance
are still allowable in the current codebase, we can be especially
careful to preserve that.

 > Incedentally, how do these distributions differ? Is there a list of
 > features that have been added?

  This has been asked many times, but I don't recall 1.2 well enough
off-hand.  Please submit this as a documentation feature request in
the Expat bug manager on SourceForge:

	http://sourceforge.net/projects/expat/

and I'll try to get to it in a few weeks, when my current swampage has
a chance at subsiding.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation