There's absolutely nothing about your definition of templating languages ("all about filling in holes in a template") that precludes them being procedural languages (or functional languages for that matter, as XSLT attempts to be). That's just your own arbitrary, artificial limitation that unfortunately has been religiously applied to this particular templating language. It's simply a trade-off that somebody decided to make, too long ago to change. The fact that "else" is kludgy is just one of the many unfortunate consequences of that design decision. That shouldn't discourage people from designing better templating languages. Please don't impinge on the definition of all templating languages, just because of the limitations of one particular implementation. Lisp is a wonderfully powerful templating language, and it certainly supports procedural, functional, object oriented, and many other kinds of programming. However, the standard, agreed-upon definition of XML EXPLICITLY defines attributes as being unordered, so any so-called "templating" language that depends on the order of attributes is BY DEFINITION not standard XML, and should not be advertised as such. -Don From: "Chris Withers" <chrisw@nipltd.com> Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] 'not:' kludgey?!
on 5/14/02 4:41 AM, Chris Withers at chrisw@nipltd.com scrivened:
Okay, repeat the mantra over to yourself:
Templating languages are not procedural languages
Sounds nice, but what does it mean? AFAIK a procedural language is something that has a definite order of execution... How does a templating language differ?
A template language is all about filling in holes in a template. This should be thought of logically as happening 'all at once', so _not_ in a definite order of execution...
cheers,
Chris