On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Jeff Kenton wrote:
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
having read two of the most recent threads -- how to find the
largest value less than a threshold, and how to find local extrema --
i'm starting to wonder whether there's a point when someone has
the right to say, "no, that's going beyond what XSLT was meant
to do."
There are two parts to this. First, there are things that are
reasonable uses for XSLT. Some are hard right now, but solutions will
be added to XSLT 2.0 -- grouping, regular expressions and date handling
are examples. Some other things can be done, but will always be a
little difficult. Then again, there are things that XSLT will never do
well. Yesterday's thread about converting Cobol (or maybe Cobol Data)
to XML probably goes in that category.
i had already gleaned that much from the previous discussions. i was
just intrigued by the problems that people were trying to solve with
XSLT that seemed to be *really* pushing the bounds of what XSLT
seemed to have been designed for, that's all. and it was hard
to ignore the parallels with what i saw had happened with
UNIX shell scripting.
rday
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