[xquery-talk] Is it possible to maintain a list of value in XQuery

David Lee dlee at calldei.com
Wed May 15 13:05:53 PDT 2013


Wow ... I really hoped our ivory tower was immune from personal attacks.... what's up with today a full moon crossing mars?
If *anyone* on this list, or the entire world for that matter, knows about program optimization I would put Mike at the top of the list, higher than anyone I know personally and likely higher than anyone I know via Nth relation.
So could we stop that and get back to decency ?  XQuery itself is efficient or not based in the implementation, not the language.  And yes some optimizations are hard, possibly so hard they never get done or only done by <exclude my favorite prrocessor>

As for the ugliness of XQuery code ... point taken.  XQuery is not always pretty ... but then it has many flavors. 
I personally find it beautiful.

I am sure one could come up with prettier code.  Although I myself don't see any ugliness in the code  I wrote,
and don't see how it would be prettier in a procedural fashion ... or why it matters to the poster ...
Was subjective beauty part of the prerequisite ?

And the question was asked about XQuery, not XQuery + (Add feature X We are proud of but isn't XQuery)
Might as well jump to C or Java or Haskell or <insert your favorite language that isnt XQuery>


BUT ... if you want an answer to "Could I use another language instead of XQuery but is close enough to get on this list"
I of course recommend xmlsh ... it solves ALL problems and is prettier than any other language.
www.xmlsh.org



 ----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee at calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org

-----Original Message-----
From: daniela florescu [mailto:dflorescu at me.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 2:24 PM
To: Michael Kay
Cc: talk at x-query.com; David Lee; Kunal Chauhan
Subject: Re: [xquery-talk] Is it possible to maintain a list of value in XQuery

> 
> No, if you are horrified by the inefficiency of this code then switch to an XQuery processor with a decent optimizer.

You know, Michael, I would mellow down a little bit if I were you.

Or at least try some benchmarks before hand (I did, and the results might surprise you ).

If you can strongly say such a statement, it either that you never understood how complicate of a problem 
optimization is (how many different cases, how to do a compromise between complexity of program vs. size of the data,
how to make sure that the optimization time stays reasonable, etc, etc,), or you are totally dishonest.

So, I don't know, a more mellow approach would be probably better.

=====

As a matter of fact,  I wasn't even talking about runtime when I wrote that email. (even though it applies to execution time, too).

I was horrified about HOW UGLY that code looked.

As a programmer, I would't like to write that.

Cheers
Dana









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