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Re: Quasi-Literals and XML
- To: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
- Subject: Re: [xsl] Quasi-Literals and XML
- From: David Carlisle <davidc at nag dot co dot uk>
- Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 13:35:29 GMT
- References: <41F966E6F6E5D311AFE000508B6FC21E052613D9@ex-nld-u2.baan.com>
- Reply-To: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
> I thought the XSL gurus back
> then pretty much agreed that XSL was Turing-complete?
'tis so. In XSLT 1.0 you need to use string handling to implement the
tape, which is a bit of a pain, but given foo:node-set() or xslt 1.1
implicit rtf-node set conversion you can use node lists which makes
it a lot more reasonable.
But being turing complete doesn't really say much, that was turing's
point that essentially any type of machine/programming language would end up
being able to evaluate the same set of functions.
Of course the comment that you quote
> "XSL is a specialized language built specifically for transforming XML, into
> XML or other notations, but not for transforming other notations into XML.
is perfectly valid, and is explictly stated by the XSLT spec.
So I don't think that is necessarily a "criticism" of xsl, just a
statement of fact.
Being turing complete, one could write a regexep string matcher in XSLT,
if you had a spare month or two to write it, and your users had a
similar amount of time to run it.....
David
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