Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

> As Didier PH Martin (mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) correctly pointed out, a
> pattern matching language is never sufficient by itself to do general
> structural transformations. 

Right. But then, XSL is not intended as a general structural
transformation language. Its a style language that includes the ability
to do some transformation as part of the styling step.

> He's also correct in that it would have been
> interesting to start with a procedural language (say, JavaScript) and add
> pattern matching facilities to it, instead of starting with a pattern
> matching language and adding procedural hooks to it.

You mean, like Spice?

> The benefits of XSL's approach is that the simple things are less
> intimidating then they would have been in a souped-up JavaScript approach.

Yes. While a programattic approach always in theory yeilds more power,
this is rather like a customer looking to buy a wordprocesso and being
sold a C compiler "now you can write whatever you want ... in theory ...
"

--
Chris



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