minor commenting in table.awk. Topics modified to accept a list of qid to scope the query list by.
It's more reasonable to pass various query construction options to Topics.query() in stead of Topics.__init__(). It feels nicer to 'get a query(of_a_kind)'.
setup code uses newer Topics interface. ziff experiments in setup.
minor edits
Corrected error strings.
fixed path to qid lists
The oldest TREC topics (1-150) have more troubling variations. So far hack_n_hew() assumed one level of nesting, but the earliest TREC topics have a <fac> (for fact) tag that encloses some facts by a </fac> tag inside a <top></top>. This was fixed. And one extraneous '>' symbol threw the parser off course. So another stack is used to push and pop angular brackets and pass through imbalanced angular brackets.
Broken parser. Need to handle nested tags in TREC topic file. Previous commit about having improved parser was untested, ignore it.