[xquery-talk] Screen-scraping with XQuery

[R. Mark Volkmann]

Quoting Michael Kay <mhk at mhk.me.uk>:

> > I don't like calling named templates as well, but I believe XQuery 1.0
> > should be compared with XSLT 2.0 in all fairness. XSLT 2.0 introduces
> > functions, and while the syntax to declare such functions is a little
> > heavier in XSLT (especially for parameters), calling them from XPath
> > expressions is much lighter than using XSLT 1.0's named templates.
> >
>
> Getting the syntax more concise was certainly one of the things that was on
> my personal agenda for XSLT 2.0, though there was a surprising amount of
> resistance from people who liked it the way it was. A little comparison is
> interesting: my "knight's tour" program (which computes a knight's tour of
> the chessboard) was 276 non-comment lines in XSLT 1.0, 159 non-comment lines
> in XSLT 2.0, and 155 non-comment lines in XQuery. I think most people would
> find the XSLT and XQuery versions equally mind-blowing, unless they have
> spent six months learning functional programming.

Is there a place on the web where we can look at the three versions of that
code?  I admit I'm surprised that the XSLT 2.0 code is so close in number of
lines to the XQuery code.  I'd like to see that.

--
R. Mark Volkmann
Partner, Object Computing, Inc.