Abstract

this paper, we present a preliminary design for a statically typed programming language, XDuce (pronounced "transduce "). XDuce is a tree transformation language, similar in spirit to mainstream functional languages but specialized to the domain of XML processing. Its novel features are regular expression types and a corresponding mechanism for regular expression pattern matching. Regular expression types are a natural generalization of DTDs, describing, as DTDs do, structures in XML documents using regular expression operators (i.e., *, ?, ---, etc.). Moreover, regular expression types support a simple but powerful notion of subtyping, yielding a substantial degree of flexibility in programming. Regular expression pattern matching is similar to ML pattern matching except that regular expression types can be embedded in patterns, which allows even more flexible matching.

Citations