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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML-aware programming language?
 On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 23:41:18 -0000, Michael Kay <mike@s...> wrote: > > 14 lines of code (twice as much), and less scope for reuse. No great > difference in the conceptual difficulty - both require an understanding of > recursion - but I think XSLT emerges here as the winner. (And remember this > is only XSLT 1.0). Arguably the point is not to minimize the lines of code it takes to do something (remember APL anyone? ), but to maximize the clarity of the code. I strongly suspect (and will stake the alcoholic beverage of your choice the next time we meet if I can be persuaded that I'm wrong <grin>) that if one gave the two fragments to randomly chosen software developers who have some familiarity with XML, almost NOBODY who had not worked with XSLT before would have a clue what it does, but almost EVERYBODY who had some programming experience and knew enough about XML to guess that '@secret' referred to an attribute would be able to figure out what the XQuery fragment does. That begs the question of whether that is simply a lack of education that should be rectified or a fundamental problem limiting the popularity of XSLT, of course. Thinking back to the thread a couple of weeks ago, it's not just a matter of people needing to understand recursion. As you note, BOTH are recursive. It's a matter of getting used to the fundamental XSLT design pattern of applying templates to get work done. > > But in fact there's a bigger issue - the XQuery code is wrong. It loses the > namespaces from the source document. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I > can't see any way to solve this. XQuery may be computationally complete, but > it's not actually closed over the data model - there is no way of generating > a namespace dynamically. That is just bizzarre to me. (I hope you're missing something but I have no clue what it might be) Where does XSLT get namespace mojo that XQuery doesn't have? Since XSLT and XQuery are based on the same data model, and neither fragment does anything explicit to preserve the namespace from the source document, why is it that the XQuery fragment loses the namespaces and the XSLT doesn't? 
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