Everyone thinks that just because they've made a religion out of
considerations such as declarativity and proofs of correctness, that
there is nothing sensible short of such religion.  I am (with, I
suspect, everyone else in this thread) ery aware of the science, but not
all of us slavishly bind ourselves to this science because hard
experience has shown that it is not yet any silver bullet for actual
correctness, productivity nor actual suitability for optimization.

Many in this discussion have pointed out that the competence of the
developers still provides far more solid assurance of correctness,
productivity and performance than, say:

>  	 However, using methods from formal proof proving systems to 
> verify the output of your program is useful, and there is little of this 
> done in the XML community.

And I think premises such as the following are laughable:

> In a simple example just think of the bugs 
> caught by type checking in your average C compiler.

I have coded a lot more C in my career than Python (or REXX or the like)
in my life, and there is nothing to make me miss the specious type
checking of a C compiler.  I code a lot fewer bugs in dynamically typed
languages, especially when they allow me greater flexibility in
expression.

There is nothing in the WXS type system that convinces me it is any less
specious.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Use CSS to display XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss-i.html
Full XML Indexes with Gnosis - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/08/py-xml.html
Be humble, not imperial (in design) - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10286
UBL 1.0 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think28.html
Use Universal Feed Parser to tame RSS - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipufp.html
Default and error handling in XSLT lookup tables - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook.html
A survey of XML standards - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand4/
The State of Python-XML in 2004 - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/10/13/py-xml.html