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   Re: [xml-dev] xPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0 ... size increase over v1.0

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At 06:27 AM 6/10/2003 -0400, Roger L. Costello wrote:

>Your XSLT book now stands at 938 pages.  How big will it be for XSLT
>2.0?  1500 pages?  Can a technology which takes 1500 pages to describe
>truly be considered a "Web technology"?

Is the XSLT 1.0 described by Mike Kay's book in 938 pages more complex than 
the XSLT 1.0 described by the specification in 45 pages? Are you suggesting 
that the number of pages you conjecture might be needed in a future edition 
of a book by Michael Kay be used as a serious metric of the complexity of 
the language?

If you want to measure the complexity of a language, use a metric that 
measures the language itself, not the specification. Productions and 
reserved keywords, which have been mentioned in other messages, are useful 
metrics. Pages are not. A spec with lots of examples, a complete BNF 
suitable for implementation, reasonably complete semantics, etc, may have a 
lot more pages than a spec that is incomplete and anecdotal, but that does 
not mean that the language being described is more complex.

Clearly, XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 are more complex than their 1.0 
equivalents, but I do think Mike Kay's estimates of the increased 
complexity are reasonable.

Jonathan 





 

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