[xquery-talk] Serializing using fn:put()

[Michael Kay]

On 23/03/2011 08:31, Vyacheslav Zholudev wrote:
> Thanks, Michael and Matthias, for the replies!
>
> Out of curiosity, what are the reasons that it's not easily doable in "pure" XQuery?
>
> Vyacheslav
>
>
Questions about why a committee designing a language made a particular 
decision are always difficult to answer - every member of the committee 
has different motivations. But when a feature is missing from the 
language, the reason is often that no-one proposed adding it. If you 
want to know why no-one proposed it, then you'll have to ask a lot of 
individual people why they didn't propose it. It ends up being due to 
the use cases they had in mind for the language. For me, it was probably 
because I've always felt that some tasks were more in XSLT's area than 
in XQuery's. Splitting a single input document into multiple outputs was 
actually one of the first things Saxon was used for, and was the first 
extension that Saxon introduced to XSLT 1.0, before finding its way into 
the XSLT 2.0 specification.

Michael Kay
Saxonica