Re: [Fwd: Uses of DSSSL]

["James Clark" <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> The first limitation will disappear when someone creates an on-disk
> or database groves implementation for Jade, but in that case, Jade
> will run _much_ more slowly.

I haven't implemented this, so I'm speculating, but I don't think an
on-disk implementation of groves need be slow.  The approach I would take
would be to have a separate program that built an on-disk representation of
the grove.   Jade would access this just by mmap-ing in the disk file.  I
don't see that either part of this need be much slower.  Indeed in some
situations when you are running Jade more than once on an unchanged
document, it might even be faster.

> The third limitation will diminish (not
> really disappear) when Jade introduces regular expressions and
> auxiliary groves.  

I don't have any plans to implement this.  My feeling is that for
applications doing a lot of regexp-based string manipulation tools like
Perl/Balise/Omnimark are better.

> The typical solution would be to allow Jade to dynamically load
> libraries and bind Scheme functions to external subroutines, but in
> that case, it would be difficult to keep Jade side-effect free,

I may well introduce some form of safe, circumscribed side-effects into
Jade.

> James
> would have to maintain a boat-load of system-specific code for binding
> DLLs (one set for Linux, one set for Windows, one set for HPUX, etc.),

I don't have to provide all functionality on all platforms.  If I just add
support for this sort of thing for Windows, say, then I would be making
Jade more useful on Windows, whilst not making it any less useful on
non-Windows platforms.

> and Jade will move from DSSSL-with-extensions to DSSSL-inspired.

So long as the addition of extensions doesn't affect Jade's ability to
process DSSSL specifications that don't make use of extensions, I don't see
the problem.
 
> What I'd like to see is SDQL functions available from Perl, Guile,
> Tcl, etc.:

In the Windows world, any serious scripting language supports OLE
Automation, so the Grove OLE Automation interface gives you a lot of this. 
 The functionality it provides is still quite low level but it would be
easier to add some higher-level SDQL like functions.

James


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