Web programming in Scheme with LAML

Abstract

Functional programming fits well with the use of descriptive markup in HTML and XML. There is also a good fit between S-expressions in Lisp and the XML data set. These similarities are exploited in LAML which is a software package for Scheme. LAML supports exact mirrors of the three variants of XHTML 1.0, SVG 1.0, and a number of more specialized XML languages. The mirrors are all synthesized from document type definitions (DTDs). Each element in a mirror is represented by a named function in Scheme. The mirror functions validate the XML document while it is generated. The validation is based on finite state automata automatically derived from the DTD.