Re: Why not reinvent the wheel?

[Vasileios Papadimos <vpapad@cse.ogi.edu>]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 12:10:43AM -0500, Charles Reitzel wrote:

> Without getting into semiotics - please - I don't get this one.  If both
> will return the same result set against all given data sets, then they have
> de facto the same semantics.  The same can be said for equivalent but
> different XSLT stylesheets or XML Queries.  If they aren't semantically
> equivalent, then the XSLT representation of the original XQuery was inaccurate.

Just because you can rewrite an XQuery query into XSLT, with the same 
input/output, doesn't mean that you should necessarily do so, nor that 
XQuery is superfluous. 

We still have tens, or even hundrends, of programming languages, even though 
all of them are Turing complete!

One of the reasons that relational databases have been so successful, is that 
they provided a better, succinct way to *express* queries. It's not that you 
can't express a relational query in a hierarchical or networked model; 
the relational, declarative query is simply easier to write, easier to 
understand, and easier to optimize.

I believe the same is true for XQuery; having a simple, succinct way to 
form queries in a declarative way, and letting the optimizer decide on
the best implementation is the way to go.

Regards,

Vassilis Papadimos.