Re: [xsl] XSLT 2.0 has arrived

["Colin Adams" <colinpauladams@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>
> as there is this seemingly small group that loathes Windows

I thought almost everyone loathed it (everyone in my local pub complains 
about how bad their computer is - but the symtpoms they complain about are 
symptoms specific to Windows). Just most people don't realize there are much 
better alternatives.
> And .NET can be used with MONO on any Unix flavor (not tried it though).

Well, I guarantee that Gestalt won't run on any Unix flavour if compiled 
against .NET (it might not actually run very weill on Windows.NET - I don't 
know - I haven't tried it, but there are some errors on the test suite 
against .NET). And it will certainly run slower on Windows.NET than 
natively.

> Btw, if you dislike both Java and .NET for any reason (classpath, color of 
> coffee, whatever) you may also consider Gestalt, which was fairly neglected 
> in this discussion so far. It runs on Eiffel and I dare say, Eiffel 
> surpasses Java in many respects.

As a language it surpasses Java in all respects.
As a runtime environment, there are pros-and-cons to the JVM, as opposed to 
running natively. Note that it is theoretically possible to compile Gestalt 
to run on Java - but the only current Eiffel compiler that supports 
compiling to Java byte code currently produces broken byte code, so in 
practice you cannot do so.

As for Gestalt versus xsltproc, Gestalt will be easier to install (when I 
make binaries available - just download the binary) except on most Linux 
systems where xsltproc comes installed for you.
Xsltproc will run faster, but is non-compliant to the XSLT 1.0 
recommendation. Gestalt should be fully  compliant with the XSLT 1.0 subset 
of XSLT 2.0 backwards compatibility mode, except for not supporting the 
case-order attribute of xsl:sort yet (that might well be a big but for some 
applications), and you get all the power of XSLT 2.0 in addition (there are 
a few things that are not quite fuly supported yet - e.g. unparsed-text() 
only works on UTF-8 files at the moment).

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