Re: can XML-XSL do what Lisp and s-expressions do?

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Ah! if Tim Barners Lee would have chosen an s-expression based presentation
> language, not HTML, form the SGML world.....

Then perhaps dsssl-list would have been as active as xsl-list (mind you
to be fair dsssl-list has been quite active lately)

> for example, XSL can not manipulate two XML files at the same time
> ...
> 1)XML3=XML1+XML2

why on earth not? It can import as many input documents as you want,
with the document() function. You don't need to create the combined
document, just apply the templates to the nodes in XML1 and XML2 
<xsl:apply-templates select="document('XML1')"/> etc.



> maybe, for some tasks, like matching, It can do it better. And If I use
> embedded scripts (<xsl:eval> like elements) I can do many more things, and
> not artificially.

Ah, that perhaps explains the above remnark. xsl:eval isn't part of xsl,
so you must be taliking of the-language-known-as-xsl-in-ie5 which is an
almost completely different language to the w3c XSLT recommendation.

But to answer the question in the header, XSL does not have all the
reflexive power of lisp, templates and expressions and data can not so
easily be converted from one to the other by a casual use of `. This
makes less powerful but apparently more understandable.

David


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list