Re: xsl:script: functions written in XSLT

Jeni Tennison wrote:
> 
[snip: proposal that XSLT 1.1 permit functions to be defined in XSLT]
> 
> Any comments?
> 
I'm strongly in favour, not only for the reasons mentioned but also for
performance - the interesting article at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/articles/xml03202000.asp describes how
performance improved 115% by replacing eval expressions with XSLT or
XPath expressions. In our own tests removing a single eval from an
MSXML3 stylesheet gave a 15% performance improvement.

Obviously you can't avoid call-outs to external systems, but the ability
to provide missing string, date and numeric functions as pure XSLT
"include" libraries would be really useful, and would give the language
a convenient evolution space.

A little bit of syntax sugar could go a long way here to keeping XSLT
code compact, portable, maintainable and performant.

Francis.

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