Re: [xsl] RE: Are there things missing in XSLT which force people to use, say, Java to process XML?

[Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 30/10/2010 21:43, G. Ken Holman wrote:
> There is no way (again: I know of) for
> defining really new data types in a way comparable to, say, Haskell. 
This fact certainly defines a limitation of XQuery and XSLT in a way 
that the absence of particular function libraries does not. The 
languages are designed for processing XML, and the type system they use 
is therefore strongly based on XML.

The most recent drafts of the language add higher-order functions - 
functions as first-class values - and with a bit of ingenuity this 
allows arbitrarily complex data structures to be constructed, though not 
always in very intuitive ways. In the XSL Working Group we've recently 
been having discussions about adding other data structuring capabilities 
to the language, such as maps, structs, or tuples: no decisions yet.

Michael Kay
Saxonica