static typing of XQuery?

[Frans Englich]

On Wednesday 20 September 2006 19:06, Michael Kay wrote:
> > How much interest is there in the "static typing" feature?
>
> There seem to be two clusters of interest in it: (a) Microsoft, and (b)
> academics.

Why Microsoft in particular?

Nope, I don't really expect a grandiose answer from you Mike, but perhaps 
someone else can hum in. E.g, why would Microsoft be more interested in it 
than Oracle?

> > Which (current, actively maintained, aiming for completeness)
> > implementations implement the static typing feature?
> >
> > As the SVN version of Qexo now passes more and more of the
> > testsuite, I'm considering whether to tackle static typing.
>
> I think that schemaless data is an important use case, and in my view
> pessimistic static typing is unusable with schemaless data.

Agreed. My personal interest in XQuery stems from that it is an XML-aware 
language. One could say that I'm misusing XQuery, that it is for 
database-centric environments, but surely XQuery works fine for that too. XML 
is more or less a mandatory building block in software projects now a days 
and I feel a bad need for swift tools(for example, using the DOM is a mess). 

For such scenarios, using XQuery to safely and easy generate/query small 
pieces of XML, schemaless data is probably common.


Cheers,

		Frans