Re: XSL as a Programming Language

----- Original Message ----- 

From: Eric van der Vlist 

> > was wondering if people on this group also feel that xslt could replace
> > traditional programming languages.
> 
> IMHO, XSLT cannot replace a programming language in its current shape
> (standard XSLT is lacking many key functions), but it can very nicely be
> used together with a standard programming language using extensions to
> call external functions.

The question is how good are 'traditional programming languages'
for some ( actually - general ) tasks. 

Another question is 'what is traditional programming language'?

If  perl could be called a 'traditional programming language'  - 
XSLT could replace it. 

Perl is good  for processing of text files with regular expressions 
( But there are text files which are good for perl and which are 
bad for prel). 

XSLT is good for processing XML files with XPath 
'regular expressions'. 

Perl is almost useless without the extensions written in C. 

XSLT is almost useless without the extensions written in java.

The biggest problem of XSLT is verbosity ( using 
5 lines of code to write foo( bar) is almost crazy for any 
language, because programming is about functions), 
but this is solvable. Actually 'missing else' and 'updateable
variables' is also solvable.

Semantics of XSLT constructions is powerful enough + 
XSLT has one serious advantage comparing to other 
'traditional'  languages  - it is a first nice mix of dataflow
with processing code.  Maybe there are / were better 
attempts - I don't know. 

Rgds.Paul.

PS. I think there is at least 2 projects trying to use XSLT 
for server side scripting, not only for rendering of one 
XML file into one HTML page. ( Rmdms and Ux ). 

Also there is ( at the moment ;-) at least 2 interesting 
variations around XSLT. ( Resin and AxKit ).

Rmdms
http://rmdms.sourceforge.com

Ux.
http://www.pault.com/Ux/

Resin
http://www.caucho.com/

AxKit
http://www.axkit.com




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