On Tuesday 02 December 2008 11:03:04 Andrew Welch wrote:
> Something to consider is Scala, which contains an xml type:
>
> http://www.scala-lang.org/node/131
>
> ...so you have both a general purpose language with an inbuilt xml
> processing ability.

I'm seriously considering a rewrite of my XML->RDF extraction library Krextor
(http://kwarc.info/projects/krextor/) in Scala.  The internal XSLT
implementation of the generic extraction algorithm that is independent from a
particular XML input language and from a particular output RDF notation (be it
text or XML) has become quite complex.  I would have liked to do parts of it
in functional style and got used to FXSL, but due to some technical
limitations (FXSL's implementation of currying), it didn't quite get as
functional as I wanted it to be.

On the other hand, I want to keep it easy for the users of my library (none so
far, but some expected): They should be able to write easy patterns (e.g.
XPath) that map XML elements or attributes to URIs of ontology concepts,
whenever they implement a new extraction module for some XML language.

Therefore, I need a language with XML built into the syntax.  Scala offers
this, but its XML document model is quite limited, compared to DOM.  (Of
course, it's more efficient instead, and DOM can be used with Scala, but not
with nice syntactical support like pattern matching.)  E.g., I sometimes need
patterns that traverse the parent or sibling axes, and for that, I'd need to
take care of passing around such arguments myself.

Cheers,

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype duke4701