What should a Native XML Programming Language do?
A Native XML Programming Language must provide the fundamental operations needed for XML. Some of these operations are required because of the structure of XML itself. A Native XML Programming Language should be able to easily find anything in an XML structure. XQuery, like XSLT, uses XPath for this purpose. Every XPath expression is also an XQuery expression. For instance, if the variable $cust is bound to a Customers element that contains the rows of a relational table, represented using the SQL/XML mappings, then the following path expression finds all the CustIds from that table: A Native XML Programming Language should be able to easily create any XML structure. XQuery uses the syntax of XML for this purpose. For instance, the following XQuery expression creates a Customer element: When XQuery uses the syntax of XML, a curly brace escapes to the syntax of XQuery, allowing dynamic expressions to be inserted. Here is an example that creates a customer with a new unique identifier: A
