[xquery-talk] Top N Most Common Mistakes
Torsten Grust
grust at in.tum.de
Thu Aug 2 18:21:33 PDT 2007
Don,
consider the following XQuery expression:
let $x := <x/> return $x is $x
which will return return true (`is' test for identical nodes).
Textual substitution of <x/> for all occurrences of $x leads
to
<x/> is <x/>
which will return false (the two constructors construct two
distinct element nodes). Referential transparency is lost
(we cannot replace $x with its value without changing the
meaning of the expression), the FP guys would say.
There are other issues (scoping, for example) which make plain
textual substitution of variables invalid -- concepts like bound
and free variables come into play, then.
Cheers,
--Torsten
On Aug 2, 2007 at 16:40, Smith, Donald T. wrote with possible deletions:
>> You still get the people who imagine that because variables are
> flagged
>> with a "$" sign they must work by textual substitution.
>
> I don't have the CS background to quite understand how variables work
> via textual substitution and how they work some other way. I do
> know --
> from reading Michael Kay's books -- that XSLT is a functional language
> and that variables in XSLT can't be updated. I do understand quite
> well
> template-based processing and recursive templates.
>
> If it's not too much of a digression into CS theory, could someone
> explain this point?
--
| Prof. Dr. Torsten Grust grust at in.tum.de |
| http://www-db.in.tum.de/~grust/ |
| Database Systems - Technische Universität München (Germany) |
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