[plt-scheme] XML and Programming

Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> Careful, this is long.

How to encourage me not to read your email until it's about to expire. ;-)

> A better forum would probably be comp.lang.scheme, but (a) I'm talking
> about stuff which is implemented in PLT, (b) I don't want to get dragged
> to useless flamewars - people here (I think) are more focused...  [...]

No-one requires you to get dragged into the flamewars.  Handling cls does
require rather more energy, though (or a total disregard for the opinions
that you don't care about).

Is putting (read-case-sensitive #t) in a module something which changes the
system default?  If so, I think that's a bit arrogant.  If not, why is it
mentioned in the doc?  The doc is already quite long.

> What just hit me is that this looks very much like what I'm using now
> in Nuprl: the problem there is that I want to represent Nuprl syntax,

Nuprl?  Please tell me that's not what I think.

> avoiding fundamental changes to the system.

Aren't you already changing it fundamentally with :keywords?

> This restriction disqualifies a Scheme-like solution of a `quote' (or
> `quasi-quote') context that prevents evaluation in its scope.  [...]

Excuse me while I rattle my head a bit to see if it really does prevent
it entirely...

> Now, when I was trying to compare what I'd get from SSAX (or whatever
> is the thing which is the equivalent of XSLT, sorry for not knowing
> more about it)

There is an implementation of part of XSLT using SSAX, called STX.  There
are ways to do transformation-by-example of SXML, eg using match.  Of
course, XSLT is Turing-complete, so Scheme itself could be said to be
equivalent to it (wheeeeeee....) and all of the above are just using Scheme
to transform XML anyway.

> to what I have, I realized that this functionality is something that I
> prefer over the general pattern transformations since the way I do it is
> using standard Scheme code, which gives me an equivalent power. [snip!]

What is the deficiency that you perceive in using Scheme code to transform
XML via SXML, either through syntax-rules, match, defmacro or some other
way?

Hope the reply has value to you and was worth the wait.

-- 
MJR|
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