RE: Enlightenment via avoiding the T-word

["Christopher R. Maden" <crism@maden.org>]

At 11:19 30-08-2001, Fuchs, Matthew wrote:
>Ah yes - the flat XSL architecture, inherited from the flat DSSSL
>architecture which clearly didn't understand anything of the value of Scheme
>(the programming language - not Schema) - which I pointed out (without
>success, obviously) in my SGML'96 paper.

I don't understand this critique.  Your paper criticized the DSSSL 
Transformation Language, which AFAIK was never really implemented by 
anyone.  XSLT derived almost entirely from the DSSSL Style Language, as 
augmented by the element, attribute, etc. psuedo-flow-objects that James 
Clark implemented in Jade.

>However, why couldn't XSL have taken advantage of basic principles of
>programming language design?  The way to handle locality is, again, by
>scoping.  Even if "name" is a global, if I wish to process it differently
>when it shows up in "person" from when it shows up inside "product", plus
>have a rule for default processing, one might write the code shown below (if
>XSL allowed it):

XSLT does have a kind of scoping through modes (as the DSSSL Style Language 
does).  True, the templates aren't *lexically* scoped with modes, but most 
reasonable developers put all the templates in a single mode next to each 
other.  (Although some will put all of the templates for a node type next 
to each other, which is also reasonable.)  In some ways, scoping via modes 
is a bit more flexible for program readability than lexical scoping.

-Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden, Principal Consultant, HMM Consulting Int'l, Inc.
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