Re: XSL as a Programming Language

[Paul Tchistopolskii <paul@xxxxxxx>]

> At 15:41 20/07/2000, Paul Tchistopolskii wrote:
> 
> >Perl is almost useless without the extensions written in C.
> 
> Now that's what I call flamebait!
> Are you sure you really mean this Paul?

Yes I realy mean this I and spend a couple of minutes 
thinking  about this before writing this. I spend 7+  years 
writing perl code and I can not remember at least one 
more or less reasonable project which could be done 
in 'pure' perl.

DBI/DBD, for example,  is not perl. It is extension, 
written in C. 
 
Of course, our definitions of 'reasonable project' 
could vary.

> >Semantics of XSLT constructions is powerful enough +
> >XSLT has one serious advantage comparing to other
> >'traditional'  languages  - it is a first nice mix of dataflow
> >with processing code.  Maybe there are / were better
> >attempts - I don't know.
> 
> I would vote for Omnimark,
> as a user of it.

What in particular in this area is better in Omnimark from 
your point of view?  

I'm not talking about the efficeincy, but I'm talking about 
the way of mixing dataflow with processing code. I'm realy 
interested in reasonable comparsion of Omnimark and 
XSLT done by somebody who knows both things. 
Reading manuals does not help.  Sofar I think that 
providing especial language construction for 
lookahead pull ( thats what Onmimark does) is 
bad thing for 'elegancy' ( not for effciency ). I'm talking 
about the elegancy.

> XSLT isn't worth a pile of beans without
> regular expressions, even if it has a lot
> of nice "structural" functionality.

Take free Java regexpr package ( used by Jpython 
distribution, for example ) if you need regular 
expressions on PCDATA and plug it into any XSLT 
engine using exntesion functions mechanizm. 

Should take not longer than one week.

For more sophisticated intergration you could 
build more sophisticated ( or more ugly - it is 
sometimes hard to understand what word is better 
to be used) mix of that Java library and XSLT. 

Like Larry Wall did with perl regular expressions 
library written in C . Just take into account that 
because of that step perl is still not multithreaded. 

Rgds.Paul.



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