Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Going from Perl to XSL?

Posted by Cliff on from the my-wrists-hurt-just-thinking-about-this dept.

linderdm queries: "I am a perl web programmer who has taken a new job that requires me to do web 'programming' using XML, XSL, and Oracle XSQL. My minor experience with XSL so far has been horrible! It is so hard to do things that were very easy in Perl (looping!?!) and just seems incredibly verbose. I am curious to find out what the Slashdot community's experience has been with web programming in procedural languages (Perl, Java, etc) then switching to tag based XML/XSL. Am I wrong to be trying to do procedural programming with XSL?"

1 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Think functional, not procedural by colin_zr · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Am I wrong to be trying to do procedural programming with XSL?

    Yes.

    I get the impression that you're not familiar with the functional programming style. Functional programming is a style in which the entire program is defined as a function. There are a number of languages which support functional programming. (Lisp and Haskell are probably the most famous, but XSLT is a functional language as well.) I'm not going to explain the entire theory behind functional programming at this stage. I'll just say that if you wan to be able to use XSLT as anything more than a glorified template system, you'll have to learn about functional programming.

    You ask where looping is in XSLT. Well, functional languages tend not to do looping. You have to do it all using recursion.

    If all you've done is procedural programming then it will seem very weird for a while. It takes some time to get good at it. I experienced a period of frustration when I first started with XSLT, but once you realise that it's functional, it suddenly becomes quite a powerful language.