Re: Auxiliary documents

/ Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> was heard to say:
| Norman Walsh wrote:
|> Oooh! I don't know. That strikes at the heart of the "foward chaining"
|> vs. "backward chaining" question. My current thinking is that the
|> pipeline processor should be able to look at the pipeline and
|> determine an order before it begins execution.
|
| OK, that's reasonable. I think it means that (to remain side-effect
| free) processors will need to error when there's a dependency
| between steps that can't be identified by looking at the pipeline
| document.

Assuming it can detect that case. Of course, having detected the case,
one wonders if it should be forbidden from "doing the right thing".

If we adopt the pipeline engine as resource manager approach then I
think it would make sense for the pipeline engine to abort if it
encountered this case. And a responsible engine might emit a warning
if it noticed a dependency that wasn't expressed even if the
components did happen to get processed in the correct order.

I think this is implicit endorsement of a "depends-on" feature in the
language for making explicit such dependencies.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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