- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 07:49:33 -0500
- To: Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org>
- Cc: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com, Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, www-tag <www-tag@w3.org>
Graham Klyne wrote: > In short, as I understand the term, "declarative" can be "Turing > complete". I thought that was what XSLT (along with functional > programming languages) actually achieves. XSLT is functional. It is not declarative. SQL is declarative*, and it isn't Turing complete. It might be possible to make a declarative language Turing complete, but I'm not sure what the point would be. The goal of a declarative language such as SQL is to describe the result you want and allow the computer to determine the algorithm it uses to calculate that result. Programming in a Turing complete language generally involves specifying an algorithm. * People do argue that SQL isn't truly declarative, but it's as close as any major language a lot of people are likely to know. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2005 12:49:34 UTC