At 10:32 AM 9/26/2002 +0100, Bill de hÓra wrote:
>It looked highly procedural to me, given those conditional blocks and
>assignments. Is there a Prolog or XSLT flavoured variant? That would be
>declarative.
I think what you mean is that when you see a FLWR expression you think of
it as a loop. It is probably better to think of it as a lot like
SELECT-FROM-WHERE. The syntax for a FLWR expression *does* look procedural
(which makes it easier to explain to users), and naive implementations may
take a procedural approach, but more sophisticated applications are taking
an algebraic approach to optimization, along the lines of what is
traditionally used in query languages.
Jonathan
