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Rick Marshall wrote: > this is a very interesting observation of yours michael. it harks back > to the early days of 3gl programming and the introduction of recursive > algorithms to languages like algol/pascal/c. programmers then (and > probably now) have difficulty with recursion. i'm sure if you take any > set of programs and anlayse them for recursive opportunities you will > find they exist but hardly ever exploited. [!!! snip !!!] > xslt is by definition a recursive style of programming which will appeal > to a small group of disturbed individuals like myself, but on the whole > it won't. it's inevitable that non-recursive procedural syntaxes will be > proposed to replace it and will prevail. But probably not for writing stylesheets that convert TEI or DocBook - and one of the reasons is that these tasks are more easily done using a highly recursive approach. > it would probably be very good to get the w3c to have the standards / > techniques we use examined by psychologists to get some perspective on > how well mortal programmers (let alone others) will be able to > comprehend and then use the standards and tools devoloped. Are you suggesting that no standards organization should develop a language that uses recursion if most programmers don't find recursion easy? Jonathan
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