I agree with Jonathan and Mike. Having two such different syntaxes for what is essentially the same functionality is confusing at best. Hope this helps, Jim At 09:16 2004-01-26 Monday, Jonathan Robie wrote: >I agree. > >By the way, the history of this is that we tried the syntax proposed below >before we had semicolons as separators between declarations in the prolog, >and faced ambiguities. We then added semicolons to give ourselves this >kind of flexibility - and then never got around to fixing variable >declarations to take advantage of this. We still need to actually make >this parse, but I see no difficulties now, and this would definitely >improve the language. > >Jonathan > >At 05:52 PM 1/23/2004, Kay, Michael wrote: > >>I am raising this comment because I have seen several XQuery users make >>mistakes as a result of the syntactic inconsistency between global >>variable declarations and local variables, and there seems to be no good >>reason why they are so different. >> >>For global variables we write: >> >> declare variable $x [as xs:integer] {3}; >> >>while for local variables we write: >> >> let $x [as xs:integer] := 3 >> >>I suggest changing the global variable syntax to: >> >> declare variable $x [as xs:integer] := 3; >> >>An external variable would be: >> >> declare variable $x [as xs:integer] external; >> >>Michael Kay > ======================================================================== Jim Melton --- Editor of ISO/IEC 9075-* (SQL) Phone: +1.801.942.0144 Oracle Corporation Oracle Email: mailto:jim.melton@oracle.com 1930 Viscounti Drive Standards email: mailto:jim.melton@acm.org Sandy, UT 84093-1063 Personal email: mailto:jim@melton.name USA Fax : +1.801.942.3345 ======================================================================== = Facts are facts. However, any opinions expressed are the opinions = = only of myself and may or may not reflect the opinions of anybody = = else with whom I may or may not have discussed the issues at hand. = ========================================================================Received on Monday, 26 January 2004 12:04:03 GMT
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