Subject: On side effects From: Roland Orre <orre@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 16:13:12 +0200 (MET DST) |
Now I've succeded in using DSSSL (jade) for formatting SGML-documents after a lot of trial and error and thanks to the two good tutorial examples provided by Paul Prescod and Daniel M. Germán. As I have been using scheme for several years for both research and production I think that this is the right way to handle formatting of output. It is much more flexible than e.g. LaTeX (which I normally use) as it can treat the whole document as a database. You can present those things that you want in any order. The fundamental good thing with DSSSL is that it is based on a pure REAL full programming language and not in one of all these very limited special languages where it may be hard to express things. There is however one thing that makes me suspicious and that is the side effect freeness of DSSSL. My experience is that for a real working programming language you want and need side effects. Being free from side effects makes the languange hard to use in an application although it forces a good programming style. Maybe I am wrong and there may be several good reasons for this side effect freeness. In may case I had just one simple selection variable telling which language flow to use in the printed output with a variable *language* being set to 'swedish or 'english. In this case I had to use two different DSSSL-scripts where this variable was defined to one or the other. In another case you may want to use a lot more switches and selection criterias. Anyway, if side effects like file-handling and "set!" was allowed then it would be rather easy to write some kind of user interface for different applications to adjust things, like a tcl/tk -script or something in Java using e.g. pipe/socket I/O to communicate with dsssl. Comments suggestions? Best regards Roland OK. It is not completely free from side effects as it actually produces an output. DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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