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> Do I have to say anything more !?
>
> We are 30 years after Ted Codd, and many, many billions dollars
> market later. I find it really strange that I need to argue
> in favor of
> the
> declarativity in 2004, almost 2005.
As always, it's horses for courses.
On the Saxon site I publish a Java application (DTDGenerator) that given an
instance document, generates a DTD. The current version of the application
is written to use SAX, working in a serial pass through the instance. It was
rewritten that way for a project where we needed to discover the structure
of a client's 50 Gbyte instance document. I don't believe there is an XSLT
or XQuery implementation that could do this job, and if there was, the code
would probably be no simpler (the Java version is 336 non-comment lines).
One of the reasons is that if this was written in a functional, declarative
style, it would be structured according to the structure of the output, not
the structure of the input. The code for generating each portion of the
output would examine large parts of the input. Inverting this program to
perform a single scan of the input might be possible, but it would certainly
be pretty hard.
We have more than one tool in our collective kitbag, and they all have a
place.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
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