RE: About the source library

["Didier PH Martin" <martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David,

Again the hideous monster of misunderstanding is rising his head :-)))

What you said is right about XSL and the space removal processing. I
discovered it later on when I worked on the latest XSLT specs. I never said
that functional programming is less powerful than procedural programming.
But, if you ask me what I think on this subject, I'll say that the former is
probably more suited to particular task that the latter and that the latter
is probably more versatile than the former (see? an easy answer :-)

(Note: you explained very well how to resolve removing trailing spaces with
XSL)

About the last sentence, sorry, I don't see what you mean? If you mean that
Tex is progress for me I prefer not to answer to this David My notion of
progress is maybe not related to Tex.

Also, Next time, look at the message in its original context and time and
not a lot later and only a fragment of it (without the context).

Note: Be reassured I don't suffer form religious blindness and look at all
these languages with more objectivity than you think. If your opinion is
based on the efforts I do to promote DSSSL, its to give people just an other
option to choose from. Take note that I find XSL a good functional language
that evolved very fast in the last months (this is why, time and context is
so important) I was surprised in a positive way with the latest specs. Even
more David, I am implied in a XSL engine project (on a major browser). so...
:-) Is this progress? :-))). I also think that DSSSL should evolve, correct
its deficiencies, add new features, make it better. And that DSSSL too is a
good language. XSL learned things from DSSSL, DSSSL can learn things from
XSL.

Regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.netfolder.com


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dssslist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-dssslist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of David Carlisle
Sent: Friday, May 21, 1999 7:07 PM
To: dssslist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: About the source library



I missed the message below, but Norm quoted

/ "Didier PH Martin" <martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> was heard to say:
| a) XSL lacks a procedural language. Actually the "function" support is
| insufficient for a lot of tasks. Just take an example from this morning.
| Someone posted a DSSSL script that removes trailing spaces. XSL won't be
| able to do that until complete integration of a procedural language or an
| expression language (the actual JavaScript inclusion is too limited)


Normally if you want to strip from one end, you want to strip from both,
and that's easier in XSL than dsssl. normalize()

If you want to remove from just the end, you can do that already in xsl
without using the "function" support. Just make a named template and
recurse over the string until you get to the spaces at the end.

XSL could do with some more functionality, like regexp support, but
why do you want a procedural language? functional programming is not
intrinsicly less powerful than procedural languages.

dsssl's OK but XSL isn't all bad either. Neither can express the
kind of typographic refinements that you can do with TeX, but
that's progress for you:-)

David


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