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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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