[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Is xsl:for-each "syntactic sugar"?
Hi Folks, In the book, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman, the authors assert that looping constructs (such as xsl:for-each) are syntactic sugar: > One reason that the distinction between process and procedure > may be confusing is that most implementations of common languages > (including Java, C++, and C) are designed in such a way that the > interpretation of any recursive procedure consumes an amount of > memory that grows with the number of procedure calls, even when > the process described is, in principle, iterative. As a consequence, > these languages can describe iterative processes only by resorting > to special-purpose "looping constructs" such as do, repeat, until for, > and while. The implementation of Scheme ... does not share this defect. > It will execute an iterative process in constant space, even if the > iterative process is described by a recursive procedure. An implementation > with this property is called tail-recursive. /Roger
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