Scrap your boilerplate with XPath-like combinators

Author(s)

Ralf Lämmel

Abstract

XML programming involves idioms for expressing `structure shyness' such as the descendant axis of XPath or the default templates of XSLT. We initiate a discussion of the relationships between such XML idioms and generic functional programming, while focusing on the (Haskell-based) `Scrap your boilerplate' style of generic programming (SYB). This work gives insight into mechanisms for traversal and selection. We compare SYB and XSLT. We approximate XPath in SYB. We make a case for SYB's programmability, when compared to XPath's fixed combinators. We allude to strengthened type checking for SYB traversals so as to reject certain, trivial behaviors.

Download

• Paper: [.pdf]; [.ps] (POPL Conference Proceedings)
• Short slide deck: [.pdf] (Conference presentation, January 2007)
• Extended slide deck: [.pdf] (Northeastern University Boston, March 2007)
• Haskell and Prolog code from the paper: [directory]

Bibtex entries

@inproceedings{POPL07,
 author      = "R.~L{\"a}mmel",
 title       = "{Scrap your boilerplate with XPath-like combinators}",
 booktitle   = "{POPL'07, Proceedings}",
 publisher   = "ACM Press",
 year        = 2007,
 month       = jan,
}