Re: Parameters redux

/ ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson) was heard to say:
| This still feels like tail wagging dog to me.  That is, a corner case
| is skewing the whole language in a way which is difficult to
| understand for people who don't care or know about the corner case.

I think that might be overstating the case a little bit, Henry. This
doesn't strike me as "skewing the whole language". I concede that a lot
of users will write a lot of pipelines before they need parameters, but
I don't think they'll have trouble ignoring them (experience suggests
they'll learn by cut-and-paste anyway) and I think we're seriously
limiting functionality in more complex environments.

| In particular, from you example, do I understnad that the following
| will no longer work as expected:
|
|  > [invoke pipeline impl] my.xpl debug=1 < foo.xml
|
| my.xpl:
|   <p:pipeline>
|    <p:xslt>
|     <p:input port="stylesheet">
|      <p:inline>
|       <xsl:stylesheet>
|        <xsl:param name="debug">0</xsl:param>
|        . . .
|
| because I haven't written "use-params='#default'" ?

I think there's room for discussion about exactly how the default case
should be resolved. Clearly we want to balance ease of use against
expressiveness.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | The human race consists of the
http://nwalsh.com/            | dangerously insane and such as are
                              | not.--Mark Twain