On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 11:00:12PM -0500, Barry Lay wrote:
> 
> 
> Brian Chrisman wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 08:42:03AM -0500, Tim Lewis wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>You might want to take a look at:
> >>
> >>http://o-xml.org/
> >>
> >>They have a full implementation of an xml-based OO language with various 
> >>extensions for database access, unit testing, and other goodies.
> >>   
> >>
> >
> >Sweet... that's precisely what I was looking for but couldn't seem to 
> >find... 
> >thanks,
> >Brian
> >
> I had a quick look at this one as the subject interested me as well.  
> From my initial glance it looks like the authors were trying to improve 
> on XSLT 1.0 in order to deal with many of the issues that have seen 
> discussion on this list.  From my reading much of it has been at least 
> touched on with XSLT 2.0, albeit with different syntax.  I would be 
> interested to know if anyone has used both and can comment. 
> 
> From the comments I had thought that perhaps someone had created a 
> proper functional language that could describe the essential nature of 
> an algorythm.  This product seems to go in the other direction by 
> providing more procedural components to XSLT (like mutable variables).
> 
> I would guess that I misunderstood the original requirement.

Heh.. it's also possible I spoke too soon.  It definitely has a
lot of the pieces I was looking for... class inheritance, statements,
try blocks and exceptions, a lot of things that are used in OO
languages.
I didn't think it had that aweful much in common with XSLt as it's
not a templating language.... It definitely seems to have
some vaguely similar constructs (for-each, choose/when/otherwise)
to XSLt, but they look like they're meant to do different things...
ie, select attributes don't really have a context node from which
relative xpath expressions can be evaluated... all expressions start
with some sort of evaluation of a variable.

The downside as far as I can tell, is that it treats all variables
as XML ?fragments?... so you could write code in this language
which could be difficult to transform into another OO language, but
you aren't required to... (honestly, to write something that will
be applicable to transform into more than one language may practically
require some handicapping anyways.. ie, exceptions in php4 or other
pseudo-OO languages)

I guess I was just pretty jazzed that there was something out
there that was vaguely like what I wanted, and let my enthusiasm
run away with me a little.. :-)

> 
> Barry