- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:44:13 -0500
- To: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>
- Cc: "'Bryan Rasmussen'" <brs@itst.dk>, xmlschema-dev@w3.org, "',petexmldev@tech-know-ware.com'" <", petexmldev"@tech-know-ware.com>
Michael Kay writes: > I would resist this kind of thinking. SQL was successful because it > put functionality first, and left implementors to devise > optimisation strategies. I am sympathetic to this as one side of the tradeoff, but I don't think it entirely settles the question. The Principle of Least Power [1] suggests that we don't want to use a bulldozer when a simple hammer will do. Even SQL succeeds in part because it is declarative and ammenable to optimization in ways that a more general or more imperative language might not be. I agree that we should not necessarily design the language around particular optimizations, but I do believe it's important to convince ourselves that it is likely to be optimizable. Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Thursday, 17 November 2005 20:44:25 UTC