Continuing this week with work on MLO Parser.

It turns out I had gotten a basic parser turning over which could echo some fields to the output and visit every node of the XML, but not much more.

Task this week is to turn that raw prototype into something a bit more robust.

First order of business?

Many years ago a software mentor told me, “Dan, the problem with software is that entropy seeps into it, and so you always have to be pumping the entropy out.”

She hit the nail on the head.  Of course, entropy probably seeps into everything, but software is nothing but entropy-waiting-to-happen, so the seepage is much more obvious.

“Refactoring” is part of entropy control, but really only a part.

In this case, the main thing is going to be getting the parser to visit every node, and getting it to do something uniform at each node.