Paul Prescod wrote:
> Joe English wrote:
> > Of course this may just be a lack of imagination on my part;
> > there may be many compelling use cases for xsi:type, I just
> > can't think of any. [...]
>
> Think of it merely as a convenience feature that saves you the
> application writer from writing little conversion functions.
That makes sense.
I do almost all of my XML processing in Tcl and Haskell;
the former is untyped so conversion is implicit, and the
latter is statically typed so dynamic type hints don't help
any. But I can see where this would be useful in a latently
typed language like Python or Scheme; a general-purpose
data binding/type converter utility could use xsi:type
to determine what kind of application object to manufacture.
--Joe English
