Re: About the source library

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

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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