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Re: RE: Are there things missing in XSLT which force

Subject: Re: RE: Are there things missing in XSLT which force people to use, say, Java to process XML?
From: Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2010 22:34:19 +0100
Re:  RE: Are there things missing in XSLT which force
(1) XSLT is a complete programming language, but doesn't support
     most things most developers need to do.
Correct. XSLT is a special-purpose language, it's designed for transforming XML. If you want to transform XML, it's the right tool for the job. If you want to write an urban traffic simulator, it probably isn't.
(2) Java (and others) were also designed to be enterprise-class programming
     languages.  This means the assumption that many programmers will collaborate
     around a large project.  Encapsulation and complexity hiding are very important.
     A strongly typed, compiled language (not interpreted) is also important.
     In short, XSLT wasn't designed for "programming in the large".

It's hard to see how your last sentence follows from what went before. There are plenty of examples of XSLT being used successfully for programming in the large. One of the important aspects of this is that it is designed to handle data on a wide spectrum from unstructured to structured. Handling data whose structure is not known at compile time needs a different approach to typing. This is one of the reasons why manipulating XML in Java (through interfaces like the DOM) is so painful.

Though there are still areas for improvement; one of them is separate compilation, and we hope to make progress on this soon.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

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