I am, actually: writing a parser that is bug-for-bug compatible with Apple is nontrivial, and you haven't given me anything so far that convinces me that you realize that complexity and have dealt with it in the way I am describing.

I asked because a conversation about whether I “realize that complexity” is exactly the kind of conversation I want to avoid. I’m not here to litigate how good a developer I am.

The sense I’m getting—to be honest—is that you want to ask me questions until I “submit”. Maybe I’m off the mark! There are a lot of interesting directions that a conversation about parser correctness can go. You can discuss different goals, the idea of parsing to a spec versus matching the behavior of a reference implementation, fuzzing, attacks, stack overflow, and ergonomics like the quality of error messages. It’s an interesting subject.

Note that this has nothing to do with how good a developer you are. I am specifically talking about your accuracy with parsing property lists as Apple does. You could have a perfect, XML spec compliant, stable parser and it would still not be relevant here because Apple does not use one themselves and third-party implementations which aim to be compatible must be bug-for-bug compatible.

You’re just rewording things that you said earlier and elaborating.

Right, because I'm hoping that might help you understand what I was trying to say better. Were you expecting something else?

I was hoping for a conversation.