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Programming in XSLT!

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Not so long ago, I posted a programming challenge, and received solutions in many different languages. Just when I thought people had forgot about this, I got this one from Anton Triest. It was written in a programming language called ... (surprise) XSLT!

Ask not what you can do in XSLT; ask what you cannot do in XSLT. :-)

(For those of you concerned that you need to buy an XSLT compiler to try it out, take heart -- all you need is your web browser)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2004
    Some notes:

    1. XSLT is probably more suited than Haskell for transforming XML documents.

    2. Anton's use of Frank Bouma's smart algorithm makes his XSLT transformation remarkably faster than the one originally posted in Haskel. This will become obvious if a dictionary of non-trivial size is used (I can provide one, containing 46000 wordforms, approx. 960KB).

    I'd be very much interested if you could publish some comprehensive performance results using your implementation with such real-world dictionary and if you could also provide the dictionary (or use mine), so that comparisons with other algorithms/implementations could be possible. The small dictionary you provided with your initial post was not the one you used, because it didn't contain some words printed in the results.

    3. As to what can be done with XSLT -- just have a look at the FXSL page. I can add that spelling checking can be handled quite efficiently in XSLT .

    Cheers,

    Dimitre Novatchev.