Re: Proposed new requirement: Ability to produce textual output

* Robert Barta
| 
| Let's look at XQuery (SQL is such a ... mature language): [...]
| 
| In the first for-loop the results is narrowed-in: books with editors.
| Some results can be directly used from this match like the title. For
| other some more navigation is done ($b/...go..somewhere../...).
| 
| After the navigation phase these results again could be subjected a
| search or used to build a new search: [...]

That's a pretty clear explanation of what you mean by having both
navigational and matching features in the same language, but why did
you say you think both should be in the language? That's really the
thing I am unsure of. Aren't they just really the same operations
performed in different phases of the query evaluation? Or, to put it
another way, the same operations performed with different intents?
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| That is a good question. TMTL solves this by having conditional
| features in the output language itself, but if there is only a query
| result and then a rendering of that this may be difficult.
 
* Robert Barta
|
| Right, so I simply assume that there should be an 'if' in the query
| language.

That might well do the trick if you can interleave that with
navigation/matching and output production. I tried doing that with
tolog, but the result was way too painful. I'm still not sure whether
the problem was with the approach in general or with my particular
design. (I still have a text file with my notes if anyone's
interested.)

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >