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> Come on, XSLT is not a "special-purpose scripting language", it's turing complete functional language,
What makes you think there is any conflict between these two statements? It is very difficult *not* to be Turing complete.
> And XSLT is designed to allow compiation, that's why xsl:include cannot be dynamic and there is no dynamic XPath evaluatuion even in XSLT2.
People often talk about "compiled languages" vs "interpreted languages" which is of course nonsense: You can only talk about compiled vs
interrpeted implementations. However, there is a diffence is the "mid-set" and culture of programming languages, and what kind of implementation they facilitate - and what kind of implementation people expect. Many "interpreted" languages" do at least some minimal level of compilation. One important practical difference with "compiled languages" is that people expect a compilation step, and to get static errors at compile time. But this is more a matter of culture than a hard-and-fast definition, as people can run valiators and error-checkers on a "script" as well as on a "program".
> Moreover, *all* XSLT processors I'm aware do compile XSLT stylesheets and do optimize from //* stuff to tail recursion, that's all pretty possible even in XSLT1.0.
I know very little about this. I would expect most implementations to "compile" to some internal form, like a special-purpose bytecode. Is it common to compile to a general-purpose bytecode (such as Java or .net CIL), or native code? (I've actually done a little work compiling XSLT to Java bytecodes, though its too incomplete to be very useful.)
> XQuery and XSLT2 really look extremelly similar, except for syntax, but does syntax matter?
Syntax matters a lot. If you don't think syntax matters, then you shouldn't believe XML matters, since XML is little more than a standard syntax for data. Some syntaxes are more convenient to write, easier to read, and easier to detect errors in than others. Programmer productivity varies inveresely with how many tokens are needed to express common tasks, and that is partly a matter of syntax. XSLT except for XPath is of course very verbose. Plus there is the inconsistency between the XPath syntax/world and the XML syntax/world; XQuery doesn't have this divide.
> "XQuery is XSLT with no templates" (c)Jeni Tennison probably.
Templates are basically just functions, which XQuery has. What XQuery doesn't have is the template *engine* - i.e. apply-templates.
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