Subject: [xsl] RE: For expressions and / operator in XPath 2.0 From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 09:28:44 -0000 |
> It's a shame. I do dislike all the keywords that seem to have infected > XPath, which make it seem more like a programming language in its own > right than a simple expression language :( I don't suppose we could > get rid of this one and use some kind of symbol or operator instead, > like: > > //rate -> (@value * @quantity) > Yep. We've certainly now got a rather idiosyncratic mix of syntactic styles: essentially the old path syntax, based on the same kind of thinking as regular expressions (terse, readily understood by experts, total gibberish to anyone else), mixed in with an SQL-style keyword syntax. I suspect this was inevitable, even without the XML Query input: we were running out of ASCII characters. I did at one stage suggest using backslash for a sequence mapping operator //rate \ (@value * @quantity) and I've never had so many rotten tomatoes thrown at me in my life! (It seems 90% of Microsoft users, which means 80% of the world population, are incapable of distinguishing "/" from "\"). Another proposal was a simplified FOR expression without range variables, e.g. for //rate return (@value * @quantity) but this gets into reserved-word parsing problems. Mike Kay XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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