[xquery-talk] General comparisons of speed of xquery vs. xslt

[Per Bothner]

Michael Kay wrote:

> In XQuery the natural technique is
> always to pull, which means you end up doing more tree construction and 
> copying than is necessary.

Interesting.  I think of the natural technique is to "push".
Perhaps we're talking about different things.

To me "pull" means "output demand-driven" or as the funtional
language community calls it "lazy evaluation".  By analogy
"push" would be "input data-driven", which I agree is appropriate
for XSLT but not XQuery.

Perhaps we need a new term for the following, which we might call
"execution-driven":  The basic control flow of the "interpreter"
follows the "natural execution order" of the query.  E.g. you execute
a FLWOR by conceptually evaluting the input sequence, and then
for each item you execute the 'result' body with the given binding.
You execute a function call by executing each parameter, and then
executing the function body with the given bindings.  I think of
this as "push" because each time a sub-expression is evaluated
the result is pushed to its consumer.  I guess you might think
of this as "pull" because the choice which sub-expression to
execute is done by the parent expression, which pulls a result
from it.  However, the "pulling" is a complete result sequence,
not item-by-item as needed.  To reduce materializing sequence,
each item is pushed to a consumer.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per at bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/