[exprla-devel] Re: [XPL] Is the project alive?

[reid_spencer <ras...@re...>]

--- In xpl-dev@y..., Steve Ball <steve.ball@z...> wrote:
Jonathan Burns wrote:
[...snip...]
> 3. We want to develop XPL as a procedural language, because that's
> what we have in common. Me, I see the real benefits coming from
> functional language developments - but I think it would be quite
> counterproductive to insist on this at the outset.
[...snip...]
> 5. This is a real opportunity for lateral thinking. IMHO, if we
> follow strictly in the footsteps of say Tcl or Javascript, we'll
> never make a novel contribution. But at the same time, we need
> to get some leverage from these demonstrated technologies. Also
> IMHO, this is an opportunity to stand back from some of the
> conventional wisdom of programming; and to re-open the deep
> issues of why programs are supposed to be programs, and data
> data.

I posted to comp.lang.tcl a few days ago on XPL, so funny you
should mention Tcl.

Lateral thinking is definitely required here.  Why reinvent those
scripting languages?  XPL needs to find a niche and then exploit it.
The obvious niche is the processing of XML document data.
Functional programming feels more right to me.

Now, an XML based language is going to be quite verbose.  That's the
nature of XML.  For that reason it is unlikely that people are 
going to type it in interactively on a command-line, like Tcl.
It then follows that XPL will be a compiled language.  Is that
reasonable logic?

There are several reasons why a XML based language is appealing.
One is that all of the tools being developing for authoring,
styling and otherwise manipulating XML documents become immediately
useful to XPL programming.  But are they really useful?
XSL could be used to style a XPL program.  XSL could also be used to
generate a XPL program, but would that happen in real life?
Programs tend to be written, rather than generated, or could XSL
be used as a macro facility?

At the Tcl2K conference I spoke with Dave Beazley about SWIG version 
2,
and it is using XML in interesting ways.  Could be some overlap there.

I would say "HTHs", but the above is more of a rant/ramble...
so I'll just say "Enjoy" ;-)

Steve Ball

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