On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 00:50 +0000, Michael Kay wrote:
> > I find Mike Kay's recounting of the history of the try/catch idea very
> > interesting as an illustration of how close integration with XQuery
> > proved detrimental in the development of XSLT and XPath 2.0.
> 
> On the contrary, the XQuery group has much more expertise in formal language
> semantics and without this, the XSL WG might well have put a
> poorly-thought-out try/catch mechanism into the language, which in the long
> run would be worse than not having the facility at all.

I disagree.  XSLT 1.0 was developed without the benefit of 20-binder-
thick formal semantics and it is a very clean and elegant language.
Most of its roughest spots come when it taps too rashly into some
prefabricated mess of a formalism from another language (e.g. format-
number from Java).

I would easily trust the intuition of a few (emphasis on "few")
brilliant developers for the development of try/catch rather than all
the formal huffery-puffery that has resulted in the XQuery generation of
XML languages.

Worse is better.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Use CSS to display XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss-i.html
Full XML Indexes with Gnosis - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/08/py-xml.html
Be humble, not imperial (in design) - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10286
UBL 1.0 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think28.html
Use Universal Feed Parser to tame RSS - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipufp.html
Default and error handling in XSLT lookup tables - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook.html
A survey of XML standards - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand4/
The State of Python-XML in 2004 - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/10/13/py-xml.html