RE: XQuery -- Reinventing the Wheel?

[Ben Trafford <ben@legendary.org>]

At 10:10 AM 2/22/2001 -0800, Brian Miller wrote:
>Encoding any programming language in XML should be
>trivial.  I would just tweek some yacc-like parser to
>emit elements.  Surely someone has already done this.

         It's not a matter of whether or not people have done it, it's more 
a question of "What's the point?"

> > XQuery's FLWR expressions are quite similar to SQL's
> > SELECT/FROM/WHERE.  It may make sense, incidentally,
> > to add these to XSLT as well.
>
>XSLT, XQuery, and XPath are on a collision course.
>Perhaps they can eventually fuse into one XML
>manipulation language.

         A collision course? Here's a bit of history:

         XPath was created when the XLink and XSL Working Groups realized 
that both XPointer and XSLT required a way to match patterns in an XML 
document instance. So, rather than have divergent pattern matching 
syntaxes, we got together and created one. XPath is a subset of the 
functionality which exists in XPointer, XSLT, and now, XQuery. The whole 
point of XPath is to have a basis for matching patterns in XML.

         Having a common foundation is not a collision course. It's a good 
design that minimizes rework for programmers.

         So, my question to you is: what do you mean by "collision course?"

--->Ben