> ... then one finds that
> iterating over lists is just about the most common and fundamental
> paradigm, however it will be virtually impossible to port any of
these
> standard programming techniques to XSLT as the list mechanism is so
> bizarre. One can do it (as Dimitre has shown in XSLT 1) by faking
> everything with node sequences, but that means that the sequence
> possibilities added in Xpath2 are not being used at all, and will
mean
> as you have commented before a lot of overhead in generating things 
> with identity when that isn't really needed.

To summarise:

If we are designing a new language why not try to make it a really good
one? Not that the present XPath 2.0 WD is not good, but it would be
made much better just by adding the following three features:

 - higher-order functions.

 - typed sequences.

 - allow sequences to have elements that are also sequences.


It is as simple as that.

Cheers,
Dimitre.



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