Re: [xsl] Re: Keeping a running total?

["Tracey Zellmann" <tracey.zellmann@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Myself - I am still struggling to decipher why this is so important and so 
difficult for me.

For the declarative case, where is the Dijkstra paper, and is there a 
spaghetti code analogy?
Those made a lot of sense to me.

(Dijkstra wrote a seminal paper in 1968 "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" 
which also proved that it was not necessary.)

> I feel the situation is very similar to the introduction of goto-less
> programming in the 1970s. COBOL and Fortran programmers found it very hard
> at first to see how they could write code without a GOTO statement.
> Eventually they were forced to learn, and they became better programmers 
> as
> a result. It does mean there is a steeper learning curve, but at the top 
> of
> it there are broad sunlit uplands!
>
> I think the right solution architecturally is to use a procedural pipeline
> processing language which defines the overall control flow of an
> application, and which invokes purely functional queries and 
> transformations
> written in XSLT or XQuery. For problems like the one in this post, I think
> recursive solutions are quite adequate: it takes a while to get the hang 
> of
> them, but they're not difficult once the idea is mastered.
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/