<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jun 23, 2015, at 5:50 PM, Pavel Minaev <<a href="mailto:int19h@gmail.com" class="">int19h@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">I see what you're aiming at. But, in general, you can take an imperative language and produce a declarative subset of such a language. The obvious benefits there is that you don't have a syntactic or semantic mismatch between your declarative islands and the imperative sea of code around them.</div></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div>Pavel,</div><div><br class=""></div><div>There is something ELSE that you missed in my list of requirements for processing semi-structured data.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Even if you do what you say, and you extend existing programming languages (C++, Java, C#)….. Those are ALL …. strongly</div><div>typed. (The only exception is Javascript, which has kind of a hacky, put together in a weekend kind of semantics…)</div><div><br class=""></div><div>This strongly typed thing hardly works for semi-structured data. </div><div><br class=""></div><div>Or, no, let’s be clear: ****it doesn’t work AT ALL****.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>You missed another bullet in my list (might look insignificant at first sight)…. but it is ESSENTIAL if you want to deal</div><div>with semi-structured data.</div><div><br class=""></div><div><pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">4. A battery of implicit type conversions.</pre></div><div><a href="http://x-query.com/pipermail/talk/2015-May/004719.html" class="">http://x-query.com/pipermail/talk/2015-May/004719.html</a></div><div><br class=""></div><div>Those are definitely NOT easy to define for a data processing language, I tried to explain there why.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Again, among all the programming languages that I know, XQuery has the best (ONLY!?) set of such operations.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>And again, those operations have NOTHING to do with XML. They are completely orthogonal to XML.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Best regards</div><div>Dana</div><div><br class=""></div><div><br class=""></div><div><br class=""></div><div><br class=""></div><div><br class=""></div><div><br class=""></div></body></html>