Hello!

> >  It
> > would be interesting to hear from the other side ...
>
> Well, no answer yet..... :-)

Well, here is the answer from the other side :-)

We develop the approach of XML processing with functional programming
language Scheme, the LISP dialect.

The idea of this approach is the representation of XML documents in the form
of Scheme nested lists. For example, the following piece of an XML document:

<tag attr1="value1" attr2="value2">
  <nested>Text node</nested>
  <empty/>
</tag>

is represented in the form of Scheme nested lists as follows:

(tag (@ (attr1 "value1") (attr2 "value2"))
  (nested "Text node")
  (empty)
)

The latter is both the illustrative external notation and the primary data
structure of the programming language Scheme.

XML documents represented as nested lists (we call this representation SXML)
can be naturally processed with a raft of Scheme list operations. XML
processing becomes simple, and impedance mismatch is minimized.

We already have the XML->SXML parser, XPath, XSLT and XLink processor
implemented in Scheme:
http://www.pair.com/lisovsky/xml/
http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/xml.html

We also provide the Scheme API in our native XML DBMS Sedna:
http://modis.ispras.ru/Development/sedna.htm

Best regards,
Dmitry