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Thomas outlines some of the major design guidelines for any good language design that are also followed by the members of the working group. Best regards Michael > -----Original Message----- > From: Thomas B. Passin [mailto:tpassin@h...] > Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2001 5:04 AM > To: xml-dev@l... > Subject: Re: XQuery & XSLT was RE: Verboseness - XML Syntax > for XQuery 1.0(XQueryX) > > > [Jonathan Robie] > > > > At 10:57 AM 6/19/2001 -0700, Murali Mani wrote: > > > > >a) semantics is more important than syntax, but probably they are > > >also linked together > > Semantics, syntax, and there's a third dimension: human > comprehension. The syntax must promote human understanding. > Even with SQL, for example, it's so easy to have a query > return something other than what you wanted, and often it's > very hard to be sure if the results are correct or not. > > To me, this dimension rules out an xml syntax as the only or > primary syntax, because the xml has too much visual noise. > An xml syntax would have to be considered an adjunct for > machine processing, as it seems the current plan has it. > > Even when queries will be mainly machine-generated, a human > is going to have to develop and debug the query generator, > again emphasizing the importance of human comprehensibility. > > This entails certain consequences, like these: > 1) minimal context-dependence > 2) a judiciously small amount of operator overloading (e.g., > "+" for string > concatenation) - too much overloading gets hard to remember. > 3) minimal exceptions, preferably none, so use of syntactical > features is consistent. > 4) recursion - e.g., expressions may contain expressions with > minimal limitations, queries may make use of other queries. > > I don't know if the XQuery effort has a set of guidelines > like this, but it looks as if they have been thinking > somewhat along these lines. Perhaps Jonathan would care to > comment on this? > > Cheers, > > Tom P > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org, an initiative of > OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> > > The list archives are at > http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > > To unsubscribe from this elist send a message with the single > word "unsubscribe" in the body to: xml-dev-request@l... >
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