Dealing with complex patterns in xml processing

Copyright c○2005 F.Y. Huang and C.B. Jay and D.B. Skillicorn The handling of search patterns for data access is critical to XML processing. Most efforts to integrate XML processing into general-purpose programming languages add different features to existing languages for different kinds of patterns, or even create completely new languages. The resulting languages only work for certain kinds of patterns and are hard to extend to others in a well typed manner. This poses burdens for both language designers and programmers, and restricts XML applications. In this paper we present an alternative approach that handles many kinds of patterns within the same framework. The key idea is to express complex patterns by pattern structures in one general-purpose programming language based on the pattern calculus. With this approach, adding a new kind of patterns is just a matter of programming, not language design; programs can be highly parametric over well-typed complex patterns