[xquery-talk] FLOR or FLWOR

[Michael Kay]

> 
> Where would you use 'where' that couldn't be handled by 
> XPath? In other words, why is there a where?
> 

Because people coming from the world of SQL and other database query
languages (e.g. OQL) thought that anything that calls itself a query
language ought to have a WHERE clause.

Apparently people who have spent years writing SQL not only find it easy to
bundle together all the search conditions into one humungous boolean
expression, they actually come to believe it is a good idea.

Historically, remember that early proposals for XQuery (based on XQL etc)
didn't build on XPath, they were developed independently. 

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/