Re: [xml-dev] The limits of XML mean the limits of my data world

[Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>]

Marcus, hello.

On 30 May 2022, at 14:15, Marcus Reichardt wrote:

> I had no idea something like this does in fact exist, which speaks
>  volumes tot the appeal and/or marketing of such languages

To be honest, I think the only 'marketing' I did was a couple of fairly diffident announcements on this list, to see if anyone shared my feeling that this was _obviously_ the clear next step.  Answer: no.

>  Norman, with hindsight would you venture into something like your lx
>  project today, or maybe rather try to find a better binding into a
>  hosting mainstream language of the functional or logic-based variety,
>  or even JavaScript given that it's pretty much kindof *the* mainstream
>  language for document processing, just maybe not for batch and
>  preprint tasks?

I thought (and still think) I'd hit a pretty good sweet spot, in that the Lx parser was semantically identical to the corresponding XSLT/XML input, in the sense that it produced an equivalent set of SAX events.  Thus the usual documentation for XSLT would work perfectly well with this alternative input form, and since the syntax is a syntax for markup-dense XML rather than specifically XSLT, it's portable to any similar language.

I thought (and still think) that XSLT is a pretty nifty language, in every respect other than its surface syntax.  And I'm saying that of v1.0 (which is the only one I use), in the knowledge that more recent versions are even better.

A separate tangent is that XSLT is already a functional language (almost?/entirely? pure-functional), so pretty bang up to date in that respect.

Part of the mental background for this is that my second *ML language was DSSSL (after Perl *shudder*), so the idea seemed very natural, that pointy brackets serialise the tree, round brackets shake it.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK