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

[daniela florescu]

On May 15, 2013, at 9:39 PM, Liam R E Quin wrote:

> On Thu, 2013-05-16 at 00:22 +0000, David Lee wrote:
>> I still am unconvinced that the theory that a purely functional
>> language would enable vastly better optimizations
>> has yet to be realized in the real world and may never be.
> 
> I'm not sure I'm failing to follow you incorrectly here.
> 
> Yes, declarative languages, especially with referential transparency,
> are often massively easier to optimize than procedural ones. Or rather,
> the computer science and mathematics might be harder in some cases, but
> the optimizations can be more far-reaching. The down side is that they
> tend to start out slower, so it doesn't always balance out. *BUT* they
> are also often more maintainable.

Really !? 100 lines of code are more maintainable then 20 (because this 1:5 is how it looks like when you
need to maintain a structure vs. when you have to FAKE like you don't need to update and  life is good and you are "just copying"
the data)

Really !??

Well, there is experimental evidence that says that bugs are linearly proportional with # lines of code.
(Let alone the nightmare that you put your optimizer through, trying to re-invent stuff that you already know, and you spent hours and days trying to hide.)

Great.


> 
> I started to write an essay on optimization of procedural languages and
> realised it was crazy and stopped.


Liam,

out of curiosity, other then writing an essay,  when is the last time you wrote a serious compiler/optimizer for either one !?
(Functional and/or procedural language !? And/or any combination of the above !?)

There are plenty of lessons that anyone can learn doing the "dirty" work. Dirty work is anything that is NOT pdf and slideshare.

Other then number of lines of code there is something else that counts.

 It's called experience.


> Maybe we should have a public XQuery optimization wiki, although I don't
> know how many vendors would be able to share their deep and wonderful
> secrets :)

Yes, such thing would be called a standard benchmark, and historically it triggers people to work on performance and/or publish
(or at least patent :-) their secret sauce.

I asked you for years to trigger W3C to work on this. Never heard back from it.

Thanks
Dana