Dmitre,
I'm inclined to agree with Michael on this. I think that the type mechanisms
do add (perhaps an unreasonable) burden in verbosity, but that is more than
offset by the ability to move a significant amount of the heavy lifting into
XPath through <xsl:function>
<xsl:function name="fmt:bangPad">
<xsl:param name="expr"/>
<xsl:result select="string-pad('!',xs:string(xs:integer($expr)))"/>
</xsl:function>
<xsl:value-of select="fmt:bangPad(@risk * @severity)"/>
It does serve to make the language itself more functional, which has always
been a problem I've had with XSLT1; not everything readily fits into the
nodal model, and there was perhaps too much of an emphasis on recursive
programming. I much prefer to do
<xsl:for-each select="(1 to 16)">
<xsl:variable name="index" select="."/>
<td><xsl:value-of select="$index"/></td>
</xsl:for-each>
than
<xsl:call-template name="indexWalker">
<xsl:with-param name="index" select="1"/>
</xsl:call-template>
<xsl:template name="indexWalker">
<xsl:param name="index"/>
<td><xsl:value-of select="$index"/></td>
<xsl:if test="$index le 16">
<xsl:call-template name="indexWalker">
<xsl:with-param name="index" select="$index + 1"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
In other words, XSLT2 is considerably less verbose in non-trivial cases.
-- Kurt
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dimitre Novatchev" <dnovatchev(_at_)yahoo(_dot_)com>
To: <xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 1:56 PM
Subject: [xsl] Re: Re: The Perils of Sudden Type-Safety in XPath 2.0
One of the critiques about XSLT 1.0 is that it's too verbose.
From what I see about XSLT 2.0, transformations written in it
may well have to be twice as verbose as their XSLT 1.0 counterpart.
No, my experience so far is that stylesheets that do no significant
computation are essentially unchanged, while those that do a lot of
computation can become dramatically smaller, because of features like
conditional expressions in XPath and the availability of xsl:function,
as well as the much richer built-in function library.
Maybe it is too early for general observations. I was just comparing:
<xsl:value-of select="string-pad('!', @risk * @severity)" />
with
<xsl:value-of select="string-pad('!', xs:integer(@risk * @severity))"
/>
and
<xsl:variable name="danger" select="@risk * @severity"/>
with
<xsl:variable name="danger">
<xsl:value-of select="@risk * @severity" />
</xsl:variable>
and
<xsl:value-of select="string-pad('!', @risk * @severity)" />
with
<xsl:variable name="danger">
<xsl:value-of select="@risk * @severity" />
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="string-pad('!', $danger)" />
=====
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list