XSLT, Perl, Haskell, & a word on language design

[Eray Ozkural (exa)]

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On Tuesday 05 February 2002 12:29, Dimitre Novatchev wrote:
> > So, there are actually people who seriously take XSLT to be a
> > programming language? Interesting, as I think it is just overdoing an
> >
> > already overdone
> > concept (hint: it's a poor ascii tree).
>
> Yes, there are such people. Actually, all the examples from John
> Hughes' article "Why functional programming matters" can be implemented
> in XSLT 1.0, as shown in the recently published article:
>
> "The Functional Programming Language XSLT" at
> http://www.topxml.com/xsl/articles/fp
>

It's nice to know about the computational power and expressive capabilities 
of a formal system ;) On the other hand, the examples in the article did not 
strike me as programs written in a programming language. They seemed to me 
more like an inefficient way of describing some programs. It is of course a 
proof of concept type of argument in the paper I assume.

I think I can implement some functional concepts using templates in C++, but 
would that pass as a functional programming language?

Besides, I thought two of the primary design goals for a programming language 
were readability and writability. In my opinion, XSLT lacks at least those 
two due to its XML syntax.

Keep functional,

- -- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo
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