perlmeditation
Cody Pendant
<P>
I'm getting to grips with XSLT at the moment, and not loving the O'Reilly book, I'd have to say.
<P>
But I realised this morning that one problem is that I don't really have a little picture in my head of what XSLT does.
<P>
XSL Transformations, as everyone is careful to tell you, are very much not procedural, but they're not really like OO programming as far as I can see, although it's all about objects. You aren't even guaranteed that your elements come out in document order, right?
<P>
So, I have a mental picture of what happens when perl does
<code>
while(<FH>)
</code>
which is like the file being fed through a machine, say a grinder, and I have a mental picture of how regexes work, which involves a team of ants crawling along strings (some of them stay behind to mark the places when alternation is involved) and so on.
<P>
Objects, I've decided, get fed their methods, bulge a little, then spit something out. All you get to see is the mouth.
<P>
But I don't have a mental model of an XSLT transformation.
<P>Has anyone else? It's all about Trees, so do you see a monkey climbing the tree and picking the elements off as fruit?
<P>
I know I can't be the only one who needs a visual, no matter how strange, in order to think through these kinds of things <P>... can I?
<P>
<crickets heard in distance>
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-87399">
<HR>
<BR>
<blockquote>
<code>
($_='kkvvttuubbooppuuiiffssqqffssmmiibbddllffss')
=~y~b-v~a-z~s; print
</code>
</blockquote>
</div></div>