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 [email protected] http://www.xmlsh.org -----Original Message----- From: daniela florescu [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 2:24 PM To: Michael Kay Cc: [email protected]; 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 _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
