This is the first step in a small-scale refactoring effort that will touch a
lot of the syntax-related code in moses/phrase-extract. The end goals are:
- a storage mechanism for general attribute/value pairs in XML-style
tree / lattice input. E.g. the "pcfg-score" and "semantic-role"
attributes in:
<tree label="PRP" pcfg-score="1.0" semantic-role="AGENT"> I </tree>
- consolidation of the various near-duplicate Tree / XmlTreeParser classes
that have accumulated over the years (my fault)
- general de-crufting
The duplicate definition works fine in environments where the inline
definition becomes a weak symbol in the object file, but if it gets
generated as a regular definition, the duplicate definition causes link
problems.
In most call sites the return value could easily be made const, which
gives both the reader and the compiler a bit more certainty about the code's
intentions. In theory this may help performance, but it's mainly for clarity.
The comments are based on reverse-engineering, and the unit tests are based
on the comments. It's possible that some of what's in there is not essential,
in which case, don't feel bad about changing it!
I left a third identical definition in place, though I updated it with my
changes to avoid creeping divergence, and noted the duplication in a comment.
It would be nice to get rid of this definition as well, but it'd introduce
headers from the main Moses tree into biconcor, which may be against policy.
