- From: Jim Melton <jim.melton@acm.org>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:06:24 -0700
- To: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@datadirect.com>
- Cc: "Kay, Michael" <Michael.Kay@softwareag.com>, <public-qt-comments@w3.org>
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
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= Facts are facts. However, any opinions expressed are the opinions =
= only of myself and may or may not reflect the opinions of anybody =
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Received on Monday, 26 January 2004 12:04:03 UTC