RE: [ANN] XQuery prototype

[Jonathan Robie <Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com>]

Hi Michael,

First, let me be clear that I am delighted to see an XQuery prototype on 
the web, and I understand that this is still in an early phase. I did react 
a bit to the phrase "compliance suite", since I want people to be clear on 
what the definition of the XQuery language is.

Compliance suites based on the grammar of the Working Draft would be very 
useful. What you produced is a set of examples that your parser can parse. 
It is not clear to me what the intended purpose of these examples is. The 
idea of automatically generating test cases from a grammar seems very 
useful for generating test cases, provided the grammar used is that of the 
language being tested. I'm glad to hear that you plan to use the XQuery 
grammar for this in future versions.

As for your claim that the February grammar is too buggy to support in this 
way, I do not know how you produce the examples in your compliance suite. I 
should point out that  we were able to implement a prototype based on it 
that correctly parsed and processed the examples in the Working Draft. 
Several other people managed to write working parsers using it. These 
parsers were done using different tools such as JavaCC and CUP, and they 
correctly parsed the examples in the XQuery Working Draft and the XML Query 
Use Cases.

Jonathan