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curious...
Added by Anonymous about 18 years ago
Legacy ID: #3641403
Legacy Poster: Yannick (efolia)
Hello, I'm just being curious here, but why is it so hard to implement formatting
functions (format-date(), format-dateTime()...) in an XSLT processor? For instance, it
was implemented very late into Saxon, and it's among AltovaXML's very few unsupported
set of functions. I thought that formatting was one of the very first and basic group of
functions that had to be implemented in any processor/interpreter/compiler. In other
words, what's so different between an output formatting algorithm as implemented in
procedural language as old as AWK or C and one implemented in XSLT's quasi-functional
language processor? Note that I'm not much of a Java programmer, so reading Saxon's
source won't help to tame my curiosity. I tried but could not find the answer anywhere,
either on the web or in the books that I have. Thanks. Yannick
Legacy ID: #3641736
Legacy Poster: Michael Kay (mhkay)
I don't think it was particularly difficult to implement, and I don't think it was
implemented particularly late. Like most things in Saxon, I think I implemented it quite
soon after the spec was stable. It took a long time for the XSL WG to agree the spec,
however, largely because of the localisation issues involved. I can't speak for Altova,
of course.
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