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On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 00:50 +0000, Michael Kay wrote: > > I find Mike Kay's recounting of the history of the try/catch idea very > > interesting as an illustration of how close integration with XQuery > > proved detrimental in the development of XSLT and XPath 2.0. > > On the contrary, the XQuery group has much more expertise in formal language > semantics and without this, the XSL WG might well have put a > poorly-thought-out try/catch mechanism into the language, which in the long > run would be worse than not having the facility at all. I disagree. XSLT 1.0 was developed without the benefit of 20-binder- thick formal semantics and it is a very clean and elegant language. Most of its roughest spots come when it taps too rashly into some prefabricated mess of a formalism from another language (e.g. format- number from Java). I would easily trust the intuition of a few (emphasis on "few") brilliant developers for the development of try/catch rather than all the formal huffery-puffery that has resulted in the XQuery generation of XML languages. Worse is better. -- Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc. http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com Use CSS to display XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss-i.html Full XML Indexes with Gnosis - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/08/py-xml.html Be humble, not imperial (in design) - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10286 UBL 1.0 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think28.html Use Universal Feed Parser to tame RSS - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipufp.html Default and error handling in XSLT lookup tables - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook.html A survey of XML standards - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand4/ The State of Python-XML in 2004 - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/10/13/py-xml.html
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