Re: XQuery (and XML) vs LISP

beelzebub wrote:
It is reasonably obvious to see how to store this information
persistently using both XML and simple binary relation. Asking a
question, is person X an ancestor of person Y is rather straightforward
in
XQuery. How would I formulate an equivalent query in SQL?

Why don't you google "trees sql"?

The problem is not a particular syntax. You can't design a query
language by randomly throwing in some ad-hock language elements, e.g.
take some ideas from regular expressions, pattern matching, spice it
with loop constructions from procedural languages, etc. This ad-hock
thingy might work, but it would never really take off the ground. You
have to have some theoretical insight. And the area of graphs, partial
order relation, and combinatorics is difficult from theoretical
perspective -- harder than first order logic.

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