[Haskell-cafe] Haskell XSLT interpreter?

[Graham Klyne]

S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:
> 
> Has anyone written a pure haskell xslt interpreter?  If not, how
> difficult would it be to do so?

(Ah, another cool project idea that fell by the wayside <sigh>!)

Back when I was doing more web work in Haskell, inventing a translation of XSLT
into Haskell was one of the ideas I was gestating.  Unfortunately (or not), a
day job came along and distracted me from that.

...

Without reading in detail, I notice subsequent debate about how to write a pure
function that deals with XML constructs that might perform IO.  This was one of
the problems I encountered when working on HaXML:  I wanted to have options to
use use the parser in "pure" mode (String -> XML), but also to be able to
support full XML that may require I/O (XML defines an internal subset that
doesn't require processors to perform I/O).  In the event, I cheated and used
unsafePerformIO.  But it did occur to me that by parameterizing the XML
processing function with a polymorphic function to turn an entity declaration
into a string, like this:

    getEntityString :: Monad m => decl -> m String

then the dependency on IO could itself be parameterized.  For "pure" use, an
identity monad could be used, which the calling program could safely unwrap.
But if external entity support is required, then the type 'm' must be (or
incorporate) an IO, so the value returned to the calling program would only be
accessible within an IO monad.

I feel sure this must be a known Haskell idiom for this kind of problem, but I
can't say that I've noticed it anywhere.  Or is there a snag I didn't notice?

#g

-- 
Graham Klyne
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