--------------
However, this whole game did have a purpose, even though it may not have been clear in the outset :). We've found a few good ways to skin the approximate virtual cat, tossed ideas around and had good time. The initial C# vs VFP comparison was just the nail for the soup.
[explanation of story here]
---------------

Dragan, you don't know me very well. My university degree is in history and literature, with a great deal of time devoted to anthropology and folklore ...

Anyway, FYI, the English variant of that story is called "Stone Soup". You might be interested to see how often the metaphor is used by programmers; in fact I think there is an Open Source contribution-community that goes by that name <s>.

As I said before, I am glad that everybody had a good time and many good performance-enhancing ideas were brought up. I don't mean to denigrate the value of the discussion or of the exchange of ideas.

However, the comparisons of relative times of the various methods were fallacious -- and this has nothing to do with XML in particular.

Each method would have had additional function calls -- and I believe that, because each method structured its code differently, you might have seen different relative times if the proper function calls had been added.

IOW "Well-formed XML" and its requirements (the additional calls) becomes a real-life illustration of why these comparisons don't really matter very much and final conclusions should not be drawn from them.

-----------------
I know I'd never try to write real XML walking (umm... doesn't translate well, take it as "in a pedestrian way").
--------------

Translates fine, Dragan (and incidentally is reminiscent of the French "ca ne marche pas", which I have always liked <g>).

Never say never. As I said, I often do "raw writes" -- there are different reasons in different applications. I test performance of all possibilities with the application scenario in mind, before settling.

FWIW,

>L<