RE: [www-ql] <none>

> IM> In fact FLWR-XQuery has to be mapped to Algebra at some point anyway
>
> The semantics of XQuery is transparent enough to be able to do this.

Hm, isn't the tail waiving with the dog here ? XQuery has to prove
compliance with Algebra by giving a mapping, not the other way round ...

> Out of curiosity: is there an official document that spells out the
> algorithm behind XSLT?

Actually I am not aware of anything. However, a number of formalizations of
XML standards were done by Phil Wadler, see his publications for more.
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/wadler/topics/recent.html

> IM> so why not use XML as a syntax for this ?
>
> We all seem to agree that for humans FLWR is easier to
> understand than XML. Since at this stage people need to understand the
> semantics and the expressive power of the proposed language, FLWR seems to
> be a message format that is superior to XML :-)

Tail waving with dog again. To put it another way: now we have the FLWR-hen,
the majority of the XML community becomes aware of the Algebra-egg. This is
a very good thing, given the long silence regarding XML Query. A concrete
syntax such as FLWR obviously was needed to finally start a discussion.
However, semantic changes can only be in the Algebra, and syntax only comes
second.

	++im