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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Hello XQuery ... Goodbye XSLT?
 the trick with xslt is that it's a specification of what to do, not an instruction to do something. ie it is truly non-procedural. the paradigm shift is from programming (giving a clear step by step set of instructions) to specifying (if you have an x then do y). this is subtle but critical. my experience training practicing programmers to make this paradigm shift is that they struggle. they're programmers because they can build a detailed set of instructions. if you talk to managers you'll find they can actually do this sort of work better because their day-to-day work is based on broad directions not detailed instructions. the trick is to remember you're not writing a program to work in an orderly fashion through a document. you're writing a specification for something that tells it what to do should it come across something. there's only a very small class of languages that work like this. prolog is possibly the nearest of the "traditional" languages rick Peter Hunsberger wrote: >On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 15:43:23 +0000 (GMT), Richard Tobin ><richard@i...> wrote: > ><snip>why people don't get recursion</snip> > > > >>While this may be true, it's certainly a deficiency of XSLT that it >>often requires you to use recursion to perform tasks that are more >>naturally described in a non-recursive way. A programmer may be quite >>happy using recursion to implement tasks he thinks of as recursive, >>but still find it frustrating to translate, say, simple string-editing >>to a recursive algorithm. >> >> > >I don't think I'd call it a deficiency, but yes one person's natural >act might be painful for another... > >I'd be willing to hazard a guess that there's a percentage of people >who get recursion but find translating it into the XSLT syntax the >straw that breaks the Camel's back, so to speak? I'm usually OK with >the XSLT syntax up until the point I've got to do something like you >describe. At that point the syntax becomes heavy weight enough that >writing the simple algorithm with all that extra verbiage is a pain. >I think this is something where XSLT 2 and XPath 2 help a lot, with >them, for some things, recursion is no longer necessary... > > > begin:vcard fn:Rick Marshall n:Marshall;Rick email;internet:rjm@z... tel;cell:+61 411 287 530 x-mozilla-html:TRUE version:2.1 end:vcard 
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