Re: [xml-dev] An inquiry into the nature of XML and how it orientsour pe

[Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com>]

Thanks, Liam.

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Liam Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> If I write an XSLT stylesheet that takes an XSLT "program" as
> input and makes an SVG visualisation of the calll graph,
> the input XSLT stylesheet is treated as data.

I agree. In this case, the input stylesheet was data (for the
stylesheet, which processed this input). I think, this could be true
for any programming language (or most of them). Say a Java program can
take as input another, Java program and produces something else (say,
a C/C++ output or whatever). As per your analogy, the input Java
program was a data in this case (and that's true :)).

What is wished to express was, that XSLT stylesheet is commonly
considered an executable entity (like, say a Java program for
example). XSLT is designed to be like that :) It's not a data
expression language (and incidentally, it uses an XML vocabulary, in
the XML namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform).

> Program and data are not mutually exclusive.

Sorry for disagreeing, probably (not entirely, though). Theoretically
speaking, I might consider program and data as mutually exclusive. I
consider, programs as a set of instructions, which operate on some
input (which I think, as data), and then the program produces some
output (which could be data, or something else, say rendering a GUI).



-- 
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi