- From: Jon Hanna <jon@hackcraft.net>
- Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 16:19:00 +0000
- To: www-tag@w3.org
Another thought on this: The client-side Javascript on most browsers (all of them AFAIK) is not strictly Turing-complete because the interpreter is interrupts the processing after a certain length of time (with the intention of stopping infinite loops or other code that will run for a very long time) - a languge executed any such interpreter is not strictly Turing complete. Conversely while the processing of XML entities is provably finite it is possible in practice to write a short XML document that will take gigabytes of storage to process in any sort of tree model (DOM etc.) and an impractical length of time to process in any sort of single-pass parsing (SAX etc.) The former raises a nit-picking point about how we've been labelling languages, but more importantly the two show a case where the theoretical advantage of static analysis of XML's "lesser power" doesn't hold in practice.
Received on Thursday, 22 December 2005 16:22:04 UTC