Statically Typed Document Transformation: An Xtatic Experience

XTATIC is a lightweight extension of C with native support for statically typed XML processing. It features XML trees as built-in values, a refined type system based on regular types a la XDUCE, and regular patterns for investigating and manipulating XML. We describe our experiences using XTATIC in a real-world application: a program for transforming XMLSPEC, a format used for authoring W3C technical reports, into HTML. Our implementation closely follows an existing one written in XSLT, facilitating comparison of the two languages and analysis of the costs and benefits—both significant—of rich static typing for XML-intensive code.

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