Re: Fwd: Pattern matching error in xsl:key

On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 2:45 PM Chapman Flack <chap-JULfBfA8satPFr4CO1/[email protected]> wrote:

> On 09/06/20 14:09, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
>
> > because in other languages those concepts  are usually syntactically
> > distinctive and said syntactic distinctiveness is a clear  indication
> that
> > distinctive behavior shouldn't be  unexpected.
> > OTOH if you design systems where you provide smartass explanations for
> > things that look the same behaving differently your users will just want
> to
> > slap you.
>
> I didn't design the system, I'm just a satisfied customer. Dr. Kay kind of
> did design it, but I haven't wanted to slap him yet.
>
> He's not making this argument. You are.


> It does seem that one of the distinctive things about XSLT is that it is
> itself written in the same concrete syntax as the data you process with it.
> So you're naturally going to encounter cases where you have XML attributes
> that represent data and other XML attributes that represent code, and you
> have to keep straight which are which.

It's kind of an exclusive subset of languages that have that property
> (Lisp also comes to mind). Sure, you can write Java programs that parse
> and act on Java programs, or you could devise some way of representing
> data in the form of Java programs filled with constants, but that's not
> standard operating procedure the way it is for Lisp, or XML and XSLT.
>
> Maybe you would find XML Query more to your liking?


......what I posted earlier about offering patronising explanations.

There's a large overlap
> with XSLT in the stuff you can do, it has the same naturalness for
> operating
> on XML data, the same ability to contain XML literals easily in code, but
> it has its own language syntax rather than being folded back in and written
> as XML, which is the aspect of XSLT that is leading to these surprises.
>

So at the end of all that you are now calling the result surprising.
Nothing further your honour.

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