[xquery-talk] Setting global variables
Michael Kay
mike at saxonica.com
Wed Oct 31 21:52:57 PST 2007
> Is the whole point of functional programming to allow better
> optimization by the processor / compiler? Or are there other
> advantages as well?
That's part of the point. The other part is that it removes a lot of the
potential for coding errors. Programs without side-effects are much less
likely to contain bugs.
>
> As I mentioned to John, I can't do this because the document
> name can change. If I could pass the document name from a
> point external to the library, this would solve my problem.
> (I suppose I should check the Saxon documentation and see if
> this is possible...)
Sure, use an external variable
declare variable $docname external;
declare variable $doc := doc($docname);
declare variable $mydata := $doc//item[color='pink']
There's a Saxon extension that allows you to provide a default value for an
external variable.
(For the special case of document URIs, there's also another option, which
is to use a URIResolver. If you supply a URIResolver, then the literal URIs
contained in the query become abstract URIs that can be mapped to any
resources your application chooses.)
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
>
> > Incidentally, the problem of passing parameters through
> functions that
> > don't actually look at them directly sounds like a request for
> > something like XSLT 2.0's tunnel parameters.
>
> It does.
>
> > It looks as if XQuery is going to be extended to turn it into a
> > procedural language through "scripting extensions". As far as I'm
> > concerned, that's a great shame - being forced to learn to use
> > functional programming has made me a much better programmer.
>
> How so?
>
> I've had to jump through a slightly different set of hoops,
> but it all feels about the same as performing structured
> programming. By "structured programming", I mean breaking
> your application into many small functions and only passing
> to each function the information it needs. This as opposed to
> 70s-style spaghetti code, with lots of global variables and
> GOTOs. That was a big difference for me and led to much cleaner code.
>
> Of course, here I am asking for global variables :)
>
> -- Ron
>
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