OT: Programmers whos first language is not English

[Stephen Horne]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003 12:06:22 +0100, Max M <maxm at mxm.dk> wrote:

>I believe that is a fault, as a programming language is usually defined 
>by having:
>
>     - Sequential statements
>     - Logical operations
>
>xml only has sequential statements and no logical operations, so it 
>fails in this regard.

This isn't as clear cut as you may think. Your "sequential statements"
condition, for instance, is really limited to imperative programming
languages - programming languages with a functional or declaritive
style normally don't have sequential statements. And it could be
claimed that a DTD <various sick noises> defines a logical operation
which determines the validity of the document.

For me, what makes XML different to programming languages is quite
simple - an XML document has no concept of input nor of output. It may
itself be input or output, but it cannot accept input or output itself
unless the XML application adds these facilities.

XSLT defines a mapping from input to output, and thus has some claim
to being a programming language. Even though it has no sequential
statements.