XQuery as a general data processing language WAS: XQuery and Web 2.0

[Michael Kay]

> It's not exactly true. Me, together with many other people who  
> participated to
> the creation of XQuery (only *some* of us, though !), since day one,  
> we always had in mind,
> while designing XQuery, a  general programming language for XML data  
> processing, and not merely a "query" language (whatever that means).

Well, I think a lot of the design trade-offs that were made, for example the
absence of polymorphism and dynamic despatch, were made on the basis that
the choice is right for a query language even if it is wrong for a
general-purpose programming language.

Of course there's no boundary fence: it's a continuum. But efficient
extraction of a small amount of information from a large database is a task
generally referred to as "query", and I think a lot of the design decisions
affecting XQuery 1.0 were motivated by this particular use case.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/