[xsl] Re: XSLT vs Perl

["Dimitre Novatchev" <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

"David Tolpin" <dvd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:200402031156.i13BuxN3004310@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Hi,
>
> I have just finished reading the working draft for XSLT 2.0. Forgive me
> the crudeness: what are advantages of XSLT 2.0 over Perl
(http://www.perl.org/)?

I was busy today and saw this only in the evening.

I cannot compare XSLT to Perl as I don't know anything about Perl -- 
probably it is a good or not so good a language.

The best and most powerful feature of XSLT, which I haven't seen in any
other programming language is xsl:apply-templates.

One can do magic by simply overriding the identity transform. In this way
what can be produce by a dozen lines in XSLT is often extremely difficult
using a language that lacks the xsl:apply-templates concept.

This concept made possible the implementation in FXSL of higher-order
functions and the support for functional programming in XSLT.

Although there might be opinions to the contrary, I find that using FXSL one
can often produce elegant solutions to problems that otherwise would be
difficult to solve.

In re-writing FXSL to truly use XSLT 2.0 I have found that using FXSL has
become even more compact and elegant (e.g. by using xsl:function) and really
looks functional.

The only feature that I really miss is a sequence that can have sequences as
its individual items. If this was offered then one could write partial
applications of functions in an amazingly compact and readable way.


Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev,
FXSL developer.

http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL
Resume: http://fxsl.sf.net/DNovatchev/Resume/Res.html




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