RE: xslt core and intuition was RE: Reference to vari

>In my experience (learning and teaching) what makes XSLT hard is not
XSLT 
>so much as it's the interference of preconceptions about the way 
>"computers" or "computer languages" work or "should" work.
Comparatively 
>unburdened by years of experience writing procedural code, I've never
found 
>XSLT particularly difficult, apart from a short list of "gotchas". 

I don't particularly like to go with the idea that expertise as a
programmer hampers one in writing xslt, however I have been given strong
indicators that this is so. 

>One reason XSLT seems especially mysterious, I think, is because people

>think of a stylesheet as a "program" that gets "executed". 

I tend to think of it as a function in itself. 

>and rightly should contain the 
>minimum possible programming logic

I always have problems with the use of the word logic in phrases, unless
these phrases describe well-known areas of logic - such as mathematical
logic - it seems to me that xslt in most of its uses encapsulates a
standard IO function for markup. This function can be used to also
output text, but it is not especially good at that in most cases, and it
can be used to feed data back into the calling programming in various
ways which really it is not very good at either. 

>From my viewpoint, looking at the xslt as a function, it should take the
maximal possible work on itself, leaving the application calling it a
shell.



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