::really hesitates to step into this ... but like a train wreck ... he simply can't resist::
>> It's like asking why XML has different syntax and semantics from Perl. > > Well, if you read the XSLT spec and then look at an XSLT program, > you'll see a lot of verbosity and a lot of general purpose constructs > like variables, conditionals, and loops. I haven't done much with > XSLT, but I do know you can get it in an infinite loop. That seems > pretty general purpose to me. Well aside from the fact that XSLT is Turing complete (And thus theoretically as "powerful" as Perl or C or Java) the syntax structure of XSLT (because it is a derivitive of XML) makes it difficult to do some things (try writing a version of sed in XSLT). This I think was the original point. Perl handels Regex's better than C, this is one of the reasons people use Perl. It makes (some) hard things easy and (some) impossible things hard ... within it's domain. XSLT is no different. Use the appropriate tool (or Toolkit) for the problem. > I think the rule is: if you can solve Towers of Hanoi in the language, > its general purpose enough. True formatting languages, such as, > Scribe do not contain general-purpose constructs, so you couldn't >solve the Towers of Hanoi. HTML is another good example (ignoring ><script>). I do want to point out for clarity and posterity that HTML and XSLT are siblings ... in that they are both applications of XML (or SGML). HTML is not Turing Complete while XSLT. Turing completeness has a mathmatic existance beyond the Towers of Hanoi problem. But I haven't seen it solved in TeX either (::know's there's gotta be a link for this::). Rob, is what you are suggesting that one should not use a turing complete language for visual markup or that simply the language should be the best match for the solution? I'm just looking for clarity on your position. > Why is there so little discussion of the M in MVC? It's far from a > trivial problem. As I am currently mostly writing M and C and would be interested in some thoughts on the issues surrounding M. Like what issues have other people come across and how have other's dealt with them? This is the biggest benefit I have gained thus far from Perrin's eToys article (that and using it to sell mod_perl to my superiors as a better solution than Java "eToys delt with 10x these many customers ... I think our system can handle the load"). -Chris -- "[A] Genuinely skillful use of obscenities is uniformly absent on the Internet." -Karl Kleinpaste
