August 2003
Intermediate to advanced
512 pages
11h 23m
English
book
XQuery from the Experts: A Guide to the W3C XML Query Language
by Howard Katz - Editor, Don Chamberlin, Denise Draper, Mary Fernández, Michael Kay, Jonathan Robie, Michael Rys, Jérôme Siméon, Jim Tivy, Philip Wadler
Content preview from XQuery from the Experts: A Guide to the W3C XML Query Language
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Chapter 5. Introduction to the Formal Semantics
Mary Fernández, Jérôme Siméon, and Philip Wadler
“When a Mathematical Reasoning can be had it's as great a folly to make use of any other, as to grope for a thing in the dark, when you have a Candle standing by you.”
—John Arbuthnot, The Laws of Form, 1692
XQuery is described by two documents: the XQuery language document [XQ-LANG], which uses prose, and the XQuery Formal Semantics document [XQ-FS], which uses symbols. Symbols support a degree of precision that prose alone cannot achieve, but they require some training in their use. This chapter provides such training and is intended for XQuery implementers and expert users who need a deeper understanding of XQuery's semantics.
This chapter does ...