Re: [xml-dev] Create a special purpose programming language, in XML,usin

[Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>]

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(The HTML formatting went awry.)


I worked in an OASIS TC on a scripting language we called
XTemp. All the usual features such as for-loops and if-else
conditions were included. It has an XSLT compiler which
compiles it to XSLT which is run against XML input.

It is in some ways domain specific in that it was specifically
designed (originally as part of ebXML) for testing/monitoring event
logs of business processes such as EDI XML. It is interesting
how such a procedural scripting language can convert to
declarative XSLT, using XSLT for the conversion / compilation.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/tamie/xtemp/v1.0/xtemp-v1.0.html

It seems worth a look at how such languages evolve. I would
have thought that there would be more study of the microcosm
we get with XML language evolution which might be a present
day repetition of the history of programming language evolution
as whole. As such I agree with Michael Kay's observation in
that going forward the way programming languages moved in
the past left GOTO statements behind. Will programming
languages based on XML actually continue to evolve though?
If so will they progress from procedural to object oriented?

It is interesting how popular declarative languages written
in XML have been and yet people like to do the programming
itself with something procedural. Perhaps a language like
Java can be compiled to XSLT too? (For when the input is XML.)
Many people who write 'normal' code seem to like to keep
XML hidden out of sight. It's there in the background still but
their code gets written without it. At least if you have an
intermediate language compiled as XSLT which has for loops
and if/else statements then maybe the next step will be to
wrap that in a 'normal' language like Java so programmers
don't have to see XML.

----
Stephen D Green