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Re: W3C's five new XQuery/Xpath2 working drafts - Still missi

• To: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@s...>
• Subject: Re: W3C's five new XQuery/Xpath2 working drafts - Still missing Updates
• From: Soumitra Sengupta <soumitra@b...>
• Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 14:38:02 -0800
• Cc: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@S...>, xml-dev@l...
• Organization: B-Bop Associates Inc.
• References: <5.1.0.14.0.20011226170858.02a6d948@s...>

I agree with both your points about strong typing and functions.  Where I
disagree is in the priorities.  A significant number of business applications are
being written using DTD's where the notion of typing does not exist.  Functions
can and should be dealt after UPDATE.  What is the point of INSERT ing something
when I do not have a standard mechanism for altering it or UPDATING it.  I think
this limits use to the "read-only" world as far as applications are concerned.

At the beginning of this discussion, I was not sure where I stood.  Now I am
certainly in the "some UPDATE semantics even if incomplete" before XQuery gets to
recommendation camp.

Soumitra

PS. Jonathan, you do not have to respond before you get back from vacation.

> If you don't have strong typing, then you have programming errors that
> could have been caught by the type system. That costs people money.
>
> If you don't have functions, then it is hard to reuse code, so you have to
> write each query again from scratch. That costs money. Functions are
> particularly helpful together with function libraries. For instance, I have
> written a function library for RDF and a function library for Topic Maps,
> and they significantly simplify queries against these data sources. Sure, I
> could write every query without functions, but I could also write any Java
> program without using function libraries -- much of everyday programming
> involves calling functions rather than writing equivalent code from scratch
> each time.

• References:
  • RE: W3C's five new XQuery/Xpath2 working drafts - Still missing Updates
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@s...>

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