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Rick Marshall wrote:
> this is a very interesting observation of yours michael. it harks back
> to the early days of 3gl programming and the introduction of recursive
> algorithms to languages like algol/pascal/c. programmers then (and
> probably now) have difficulty with recursion. i'm sure if you take any
> set of programs and anlayse them for recursive opportunities you will
> find they exist but hardly ever exploited.
[!!! snip !!!]
> xslt is by definition a recursive style of programming which will appeal
> to a small group of disturbed individuals like myself, but on the whole
> it won't. it's inevitable that non-recursive procedural syntaxes will be
> proposed to replace it and will prevail.
But probably not for writing stylesheets that convert TEI or DocBook -
and one of the reasons is that these tasks are more easily done using a
highly recursive approach.
> it would probably be very good to get the w3c to have the standards /
> techniques we use examined by psychologists to get some perspective on
> how well mortal programmers (let alone others) will be able to
> comprehend and then use the standards and tools devoloped.
Are you suggesting that no standards organization should develop a
language that uses recursion if most programmers don't find recursion easy?
Jonathan
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