RE: [xml-dev] Create a special purpose programming language, inXML, usin

[David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>]

---- Micheal Kay
State machines are essentially flowcharts: programming with GOTOs. 
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I am seriously curious.  Could you (or anyone) explain the fundamental difference between
state machines, GOTO's and XSLT ?

To my thinking (perhaps why  I struggle with XSLT) ... an <apply-templates> is essentially a GOTO 
with the current state (the current context)  as input and possibly a 1 or more target states.   and a <template> is a state description.   The pattern matching ,to me, just adds to the difficulty of understanding the GOTO's ... as it makes
understanding what the target of the GOTO harder to comprehend (because it's really a function of the current state,
which can be quite subtle).

So what am I seeing wrong here ?  Maybe if I understood my misconception I would do better at XLST.

-David

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David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org