Mark, I'm not sure what you mean about the Inventor language being too
difficult to parse.
I wrote a file format about 3 weeks ago for a project I am currently
working on. It seemed fairly complex, but complete. I have a student
working for me who _learned_ lex and yacc _and_ wrote the lex and yacc (.l
and .y) input files to read in and create data structures from my data file
in about 2 weeks.
Although I don't know lex and yacc myself, this would indicate to me that
it probably won't be too hard to write a program to read in a file and
convert it to an in-memory data structure (C or C++) no matter what the
format is. If it is written in C, then no one else has to write it again
(hopefully just small modifications for different systems).
In other words, I no longer think that parsing is the problem. Perhaps I
misunderstood your comment?
By the way, I don't propose that we pick up Inventor wholesale either, just
the relevant parts.
John B.
-------------------------
John Barrus Research Scientist
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. voice 1.617.621.7535
201 Broadway fax 1.617.621.7550
Cambridge, MA 02139 barrus@merl.com