RE: [xml-dev] A more fundamental concept than functions: units of codeth

["Michael Sokolov" <sokolov@ifactory.com>]

Yes - xquery advocates often opine that you can easily replace xslt with
xquery using a giant recursive switch statement (using typeswitch).  In
practice though, I think the ability to trigger functional units using more
sophisticated pattern matching makes a significant conceptual and
organizational difference to the programmer. XSLT submerges some of the
machinery, thereby making the content of the rules themselves more apparent.
I'm not sure that makes this "fundamental," but it's not insignificant
either. 

-Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@saxonica.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 5:04 AM
> To: 'Costello, Roger L.'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] A more fundamental concept than 
> functions: units of code that self-select
> 
> > It occurs to me that the functionality provided by template rules 
> > represent an even more fundamental concept. In fact, functions are 
> > merely a subset of the functionality provided by template rules.
> 
> One man's fundamental concept is another man's syntactic 
> sugar. You could also adopt the viewpoint that 
> xsl:apply-templates is just syntactic sugar for a big switch 
> statement.
> 
> That's not to belittle the concept - just to point out that 
> what is fundamental and what is superficial is a highly 
> subjective judgement.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
> http://twitter.com/michaelhkay 
> 
> 
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