Subject: Re: How powerful is this XSLT? From: Tagore Smith <tagore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 16:16:36 -0500 (EST) |
On Sat, 19 Feb 2000, Jeff Lansing wrote: > In response to the question " How powerful is this XSLT?" David Carlisle > writes: > > > it's Turing complete (bar memory limits) so you could in principle > code > > a simulation of a JVM and then run the xt classes in saxon, or vice > > versa. Might not be particularly fast though. > > Not quite. For we would still have to write the XSL for whatever it was > that we were trying to accomplish in the first place. And it's the > possiblity > of *that* that the question seems to be addressing. > Jeff No, that's not true, assuming that the claim of Turing completeness is true (I haven't seen the proof, but I'm willing to take David Carlisle's word on it), at least from a theoretical standpoint. You could implement, say, a c or c++ or Perl or SML compiler or interpreter in it. Or Fortran. Or any other programming language you choose to name. Then you could just write your transformation (or say database, or 3D modeling, or any other application) in that language. It might be kind of slow... and of course it would need the appropriate hooks into your platform specific environment. The real issue isn't power, at least in a theoretical sense. It's practicality. Pretty much every language I've ever programmed in has been Turing complete. And my scientific calculator is also "Turing complete". In theory it can solve the same problems that the fastest Cray machine built can solve (bar memory limits). Some languages are still better for some purposes than others. So the question is, for what sorts of problems is XSLT easier/more efficient/more interoperable than say, a Perl script. From what I've seen (and I'm certainly not an expert on XSLT) it's the interoperability and declarative syntax that make XSLT potentially useful. It also seems that some operations on xml will be better done in some other way. Mr. Carlisle's word count stylesheets make that really clear (congratulations for coming up with that- I'd rather not work that hard). Tagore Smith XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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