[xsl] Quasi-Literals and XML

[Linda van den Brink <lvdbrink at baan dot nl>]

Hi all, 

I just saw a reference on http://www.xmlhack.com to an article named
"Quasi-Literals and XML". This article talks about Minimal-XML and
criticizes XSL: 

"XSL is a specialized language built specifically for transforming XML, into
XML or other notations, but not for transforming other notations into XML.
Most damaging, XSL is not Turing complete (does not have the power of any
general purpose programming language), and so is severely restricted in the
transformations it can express .../... The E quasi-parser framework combines
the directness of XSL-style match-bind-substitute programming with the power
of general purpose programming. "

Has anyone here read this? The statement about XSL not being Turing complete
came to me as a surprise. I can remember a discussion on this list about the
Turing-completeness of XSL back in 1999. [See
http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/199905/msg00176.html for
James Clark's contribution to that discussion). I thought the XSL gurus back
then pretty much agreed that XSL was Turing-complete? It may be an academic
issue, but then why is it used in an article like this to criticize XSL and
propagate an alternative? Is this to be taken seriously? 

Linda

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