Xtatic (Was: Re: [xsl] XLST vs. X#)

[Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

Someone on a thread from another forum suggested that this is actually
the Xtatic project, the home page of which is at:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/xtatic/

This is the second stage of the implementation of main ideas of XDuce.

A small excerpt from the XTatic overview:

"Our goal is to make Xtatic look to the programmer like a mild
extension of C#, adding just two things to the existing language. The
first is a new family of primitive types, written XML<T>, where T is a
regular expression type in the style of XDuce; the values belonging to
such types will be XML trees whose shape is described by T. For
example, the type
XML<person[name[String],(email[String]|tel[String])*]> contains trees
labeled person and containing a name followed by arbitrarily many email
addresses and telephone numbers. (Since these descriptions can become
large, we offer facilities for naming common ones and for interpreting
existing DTDs and XML-Schema specifications as regular expression
types.) Second, we provide XDuce-style regular expression pattern
matching for destructing XML trees. "

The Xtatic team is comprised of some of the most respected scientists
in the field of programming languages, type theory and functional
programming (Benjamin C. Pierce, Phil Wadler, Martin Odersky, ... just
to name a few).


Probably someone, who's well acquainted with XDuce could comment on
this?



=====
Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL



"Chuck White" <chuck@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2f0b3a565789449fa1f0a77b8b9906d2.chuck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I think we're getting ahead of ourselves a little here by saying
"XSLT vs. X#". For one thing, the suggestion that X# will be a
functional language is pure conjecture. Microsoft has developed a huge
object model library and I think it is possible that X# will leverage
that library into escapsulated objects that will simply make accessing
XML nodes as objects much easier. Or, maybe they've decided they like
the notion of XSP
(http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/userdocs/xsp/index.html) and are
developing something along those lines. Of course, it's possible it may
be a functional language after all, but who really knows, other than
some people in Redmond?
> 
> For another thing, X# is still just vapor ware (vapor#?). It may
become a language, and it may not.
> 
> Also, I think there are folks on this list who will challenge the
notion that XSLT is limited, or even that hard to use. 
> 
> Chuck White
> Author, Mastering XSLT, Sybex Books
> http://www.javertising.com/webtech
> http://www.tumeric.net
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Mark Wonsil
> Sent: 1/13/2003 10:46:43 AM
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [xsl] XLST vs. X#
> 
> > There are some stories popping up that Microsoft will introduce a
functional
> > programming language to process XML and called it X# (X-Sharp).  It
may be
> > of interest to some in this group.  For some info:
> > 
> > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,808302,00.asp
> > 
> > The final quote comes from a person with an ironic name:
> > 
> > "Is there a need for this?" asked Mike Sax, CEO of Sax Software
Inc., of
> > Eugene, Ore. "The only XML 'language' we have today is XSLT
[Extensible
> > Stylesheet Language Transformations], which was originally
conceived as a
> > way to transform XML data into presentation-centric HTML. Although
XSLT is
> > fairly widely used, its power is limited, and it is fairly hard to
use."
> > 
> > 
> >  XSL-List info and archive: 
http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
> > 
> 
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
> 

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