Re: [xml-dev] Fwd: War of Attrition (was: [xml-dev] Underwhelmed (WAS: [xml-dev] XOM micro tutorial))

On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 12:38:08PM -0400, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> 
> >It looked highly procedural to me, given those conditional blocks and
> >assignments. Is there a Prolog or XSLT flavoured variant? That would be
> >declarative.
> 
> Hmm.... so this is procedural:
> 
>    for $b in document("bib.xml")//book
>    return
>      <publication>
>        {
>          $b/title,
>          $b/author
>        }
>      <publication>
> 
> And this is declarative:
> 
>   <xsl:template match="//book">
>       <publication>
>          <xsl:copy-of select="title"/>
>          <xsl:copy-of select="author"/>
>       </publication>
>   </xsl:template>
> 
> I don't see why one of these is any more declarative than the other.

How about: because in most languages 'for' and 'return' are imperative
statements, used to specify a sequence of execution? Seems pretty
obvious to me, but perhaps there's an eye-of-the beholder aspect to
this.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA

http://www.havenrock.com/