Re: For loop over a collection, multiple

[Daniela Florescu]

On Mar 3, 2010, at 1:21 AM, Michael Kay wrote:

>> But you are right, interesting programs have side effects,
>> that is why we are running them. I just don't think the side
>> effects must or should be programmed in XQuery.
>
> Yes: I have to say I'm inclined to push the model of using XProc as  
> the
> necklace that ties things together, and XQuery/XSLT for the processing
> beads.


Gentlepeople,  this discussion start to seem as surealistic to me as  
the one we
had on xml-dev 5 years ago about how bad declarativity was for  
processing XML...
(I had 500 answers in one day at the time...)

Michael, I don't really know what you are trying to say (I understand  
that you like XProc :-))
, but you are not answering to my comments, and to the need for a  
GOOD, SOLID scripting extension.

Do you REAALy mean to say that if I want to use and increment a  
counter, or make sure
several REST calls are invoked in order, or that I need to upgrade a  
global variable I need
to jump OUT of XQuery and INTO another programming paradigm, that is  
very different then XQuery
--  redundant and sometimes incompatible (two kinds or If-then-elses,  
two kinds of variables,
two kinds of procedure, two kinds of try-catch, two very different  
syntaxes, etc, etc, etc) !?

I hope not. It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

XProc has usages and advatages, but that's not what I am talking about.
xmlsh has it's own advantages, but that's not what i am talking about.

I am talking about ***simple***,   ***common***  cases of (a)  
maintaining state and (b) controlling the
order of side effect operations.

And no, for this kind of simple things I do not want to start using  
angle brackets, and writing maybe
100 lines of "glue" code when I can write simply ":=" or ";" and be  
done with it.

Again, XProc has usages and advatages, but that's not what I am  
talking about.
xmlsh has it's own advantages, but that's not what I am talking about.

Just look at the original query that generated this thread, and try to  
write it with
(a) scripting
(b) XProc and
(c) smlsh

I really don't get this discussion/opposition to scripting extensions,  
and I really don't understand
  this kind of arguments.

Best regards, cheers
Dana