Re: Metaprogramable expressions?

Hi Brian!

On 6 Jan 2005, at 20:37, Miller, Brian wrote:

> Of the many XML dialects for processing (o:XML, dSVG, XSLT, Ant,=20
> WS-BPEL, etc), only JavaML=A0decomposes an expression into XML=20
> elements.=A0

There's also Jezix [1] - one of its goals is to not contain any=20
unparsed (composit) values.
And there's o:XML's MLML [2], which will form the basis of the next=20
generation of o:XML reflection and meta-programming tools.
You could also check out SrcML [3].

I think it's always going to be a trade-off between legibility and=20
structural expressiveness. o:XML, like XSLT, aims to be human editable,=20=

which limits its usability as a fully structured code format which=20
would be more suitable for different types of machine processing.
Of particular importance are function calls and returns, and variable=20
references, which for meta-programming purposes shouldn't be hidden in=20=

unparsed expressions.
MLML addresses this by providing a language-neutral, fully structured=20
code format. I hope to publish some XML-based AOSD tools in the near=20
future, time allowing (the ground work is done, just need to adapt it=20
to MLML syntax).

regards,

/m


[1]	Jezix	http://www.tel.fer.hr/users/mtopol/jezix/
[2]	MLML	http://www.o-xml.org/projects/mlml.html
[3]	SrcML	http://www.srcml.de/