At 11:20 AM 9/29/2006, Mike wrote:
In 90% of applications better maintainability is worth having at the cost of
a bit of performance. For example, a pipeline architecture that modularizes
the transformation is almost always a good idea if it it takes a bit longer.
(concerning which, see http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/docs/langspec.html if you
haven't already done so. This is an important development for the XSLT
community).
Yes, we heard Norm Walsh report on this at Extreme last August in
Montreal! (Though now we've gone off topic.)
Back on topic -- pipeline architectures seem to me to present an
interesting problem for maintainability. When they solve problems
that require very baroque approaches to be done in one pass, they
would seem on balance to be more maintainable (inasmuch as the
definition of "baroque" in this context might be "hard to maintain").
On the other hand, I'm not sure pipelining in itself is any more (or
less) "natural" than template matching; experience suggests it
demands a similar kind of "aha" moment before its strengths become
apparent (even if many programmers had that moment so long ago they
take it for granted). Likewise, it appears to require a similar
willingness to think of a stylesheet holistically, trusting parts of
the system you don't see right in front of you. So, yes, more
maintainable, to those in the know.
But in this example, I'm not convinced any of the suggestions have delivered
better maintainability.
Agreed.
Cheers,
Wendell
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