[xquery-talk] XQuery - Grammar? Implementations?

[Yoshi Okamoto]

Dear Ron, dear Michael, 

thank you very much for your concern and your quick and concise answers; I think I fully understand the differences now.

I am often wondering about XQuery. I never felt a need to read the specifications of Java, Python and similar languages - or SQL - but XQuery seems over-specified to me. The basic concepts are graceful - and this is a serious reason for me to use it - but there are so many sophisticated details and exceptions that you never know 100% what is going on. XSLT seems more straight-forward to me, but it is very tiresome to read. This might be a reason why many people stick with XPath and do further processing with other languages. Anyway, this is just my very personal opinion, resulting from limited experiences. I hope that no one feels offended.

Thank you again, best wishes,
Yoshi Okamoto