[xquery-talk] Top N Most Common Mistakes

rpbourret at rpbourret.com rpbourret at rpbourret.com
Mon Aug 13 12:03:03 PDT 2007


I can't speak for others, but my own most common problems are:

1) When to use braces (practice makes this much easier)
2) When to use commas (practice doesn't seem to help)
3) The fact that typos in path expressions (foo/baz when you mean foo/bar)
returns an empty sequence instead of an error
4) The difference between for and let (practice makes this much easier)
5) Figuring out what is insignificant white space, or whatever it's called
6) Understanding that a sequence is (potentially) a forest, rather than a
sequence of single values

Oddly enough, the lack of side effects hasn't proved as difficult as I thought
it would.

And most of my real problems have to do with learning the schemas I am working
on rather than XQuery, which so far has proven pretty easy to use, although
I'm only up to 100-200 line programs.

-- Ron


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