The first week of my project was scheduled as  “April 25: Write a perl script capable of parsing a specific XML, extrapolate results to determine relativity to our performance requirements.”.

That week is over and the original goals of the prototype have been completed. In fact I sort of got carried away and the prototype is now nearly feature complete, for printer xml parsing. It turned out to be so fast that I simply have it parse ALL of the printer xmls when ever I want to test it. How fast? About twice as fast as the C program. Since this is a prototype the results are only preliminary, but I expect the final implementation to be at least on par with the C program. This speed was unexpected, my expectation was for the Perl to be linearly slower than the C, and  hoped it wasn’t exponentially slower, yet it is actually faster! This bodes well for the other three fourths of this portion of the project; driver xml, options xml, and overview.

Thanks to this unexpected computational speed I will be focusing on simplicitly in the implementation, since maintainability was the primarly goal of this portion of the project. I will keep an eye out for improvements but now primarily for the opportunity to simplify the code base.