Setting global variables

[Ronald Bourret]

Michael Kay wrote:

> Sounds like you're having difficulty getting procedural programming out of
> your mindset... It's this concept of "later" that gives it away. In
> functional programming, there is no time axis, no concept of "earlier" or
> "later".

Interesting point. I hadn't thought about this.

Is the whole point of functional programming to allow better 
optimization by the processor / compiler? Or are there other advantages 
as well?

> The answer is to initialize the global variable to the subset of the
> document that's needed, from within its own initializer.

As I mentioned to John, I can't do this because the document name can 
change. If I could pass the document name from a point external to the 
library, this would solve my problem. (I suppose I should check the 
Saxon documentation and see if this is possible...)

> Incidentally, the problem of passing parameters through functions that don't
> actually look at them directly sounds like a request for something like XSLT
> 2.0's tunnel parameters.

It does.

> It looks as if XQuery is going to be extended to turn it into a procedural
> language through "scripting extensions". As far as I'm concerned, that's a
> great shame - being forced to learn to use functional programming has made
> me a much better programmer.

How so?

I've had to jump through a slightly different set of hoops, but it all 
feels about the same as performing structured programming. By 
"structured programming", I mean breaking your application into many 
small functions and only passing to each function the information it 
needs. This as opposed to 70s-style spaghetti code, with lots of global 
variables and GOTOs. That was a big difference for me and led to much 
cleaner code.

Of course, here I am asking for global variables :)

-- Ron