Re: XSLT syntax

[Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting Daniel Mahler <dmahler@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> I just meant that XML/SGML tags
> are a bit to verbose for programming.
> They were designed to be embedded in documents
> the bulk of which is text.
> XSLT scripts are all tags.
> Unlike markup, translaformations have to be read,
> written and maintained by people.
> I appreciate the usefulness of transformations being distributed
> in an XML compliant form, but I do not think they should be written that
> way.
> For a programming language,
> some kind of bracket is a better delimiter than an end tag
> (or just use indentation as in python and a few functional languages).
> Positional parameter passing is usually better than passing
> labeled parameters (though this is good as an option, as in lisp)
> 
   I can certainly see your argument here, and I think there's a very
simple solution.  Most XSL processors (at least that Java ones I've
seen) are setup to interface with an XML parser via a DOM or SAX
interface to parse the XSL style sheet.  So, simply implement a parser
for your syntax using one of these interfaces, and you can use the
same XSL engine, right?
   By the way, why is this discussion on the DSSSL list?

-Brandon :)


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