[xquery-talk] Sequence comprehension WAS: SQL vs. XQuery (aka FOR vs FROM and RETURn vs. SELECT)

[daniela florescu]

> On Jun 23, 2015, at 5:50 PM, Pavel Minaev <int19h at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I see what you're aiming at. But, in general, you can take an imperative language and produce a declarative subset of such a language. The obvious benefits there is that you don't have a syntactic or semantic mismatch between your declarative islands and the imperative sea of code around them.

Pavel,

There is something ELSE that you missed in my list of requirements for processing semi-structured data.

Even if you do what you say, and you extend existing programming languages (C++, Java, C#)….. Those are ALL …. strongly
typed.  (The only exception is Javascript, which has kind of a hacky, put together in a weekend kind of semantics…)

This strongly typed thing hardly works for semi-structured data. 

Or, no, let’s be clear: ****it doesn’t work AT ALL****.

You missed another bullet in my list (might look insignificant at first sight)…. but it is ESSENTIAL if you want to deal
with semi-structured data.

4. A battery of implicit type conversions.
http://x-query.com/pipermail/talk/2015-May/004719.html <http://x-query.com/pipermail/talk/2015-May/004719.html>

Those are definitely NOT easy to define for a data processing language, I tried to explain there why.

Again, among all the programming languages that I know, XQuery has the best (ONLY!?)  set of such operations.

And again, those operations have NOTHING to do with XML. They are completely orthogonal to XML.

Best regards
Dana






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