[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: No side effects holy cow. ( Re: process order (still...)
Arguing about language design is almost as fruitless as arguing whether Microsoft is an agent of the Evil Empire. (But almost as much fun:-) Personally I find XSL, Standard ML, pure subset of lisp etc just much easier to understand. I get worried using a language where in an expression like f(x) + f(y) the function f, applied to x, can change the value of y so affect the other term of the expression. I just don't know how to understand such expressions. (Although clearly people do) I understand that it's harder to write compilers for these kinds of languages, but that's the normal way of progress in computing you start off having to warp your methods to fit the capabilities of the machine, but as machines become more powerful it becomes more reasonable to use more natural methods of expression, and let the compiler writers worry about the details. Imperative programming seems that way to me, unnatural but necessary at times due to the limitations of the underlying machine. So, I don't have a parallel machine, but I still prefer a functional language approach to programming. It's not as if its the end of the world if you don't like this style and need to transform some documents, there's omnimark, or perl's xml modules, or any one of dozens of alternatives. Having argued for the functional style I have to accept that I've probably programmed more lines of TeX than anything else in recent years. TeX as a programming language isn't functional in style at all. Perhaps the above is all self delusion, and it's just that I am attracted to bizarre non standard languages. David XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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