". Apply-templates with a wild card is no worse than a language that supports polymorphism requiring you to sort through 8
different method signatures to figure out which one is the best match for a given call... "
I would say that is roughly accurate to my understnding ... which is why small XSLT programs are reasonably manageable to me, but largish ones become incomprehensible ... where your '8 different method signatures' becomes '10,000 different
method signature'
Yet a very large number of people are extremely happy and successful at working with XSLT which leads me to belive I must be missing a mental model that makes it comprehensible.
Seriously not trying to bash XSLT here, just trying to figure out why I personally find it so hard and others find it a godsend.
----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org
From: Peter Hunsberger [mailto:peter.hunsberger@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 9:57 AM
To: David Lee
Cc: Michael Kay; Costello, Roger L.; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Create a special purpose programming language, in XML, using state transitions
David,
to the extent your assertion is true (which I'm pretty much neutral on) then any method declaration and subsequent call of that method is potentially a GOTO. Apply-templates with a wild card is no worse than a
language that supports polymorphism requiring you to sort through 8 different method signatures to figure out which one is the best match for a given call...
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 8:50 AM, David Lee <dlee@calldei.com> wrote:
---- Micheal Kay
State machines are essentially flowcharts: programming with GOTOs.
--------
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
----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org
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