RE: [xsl] XSLT & SQL

[Jim Melton <jim dot melton at acm dot org>]

I just *had* to offer my 2¢ worth...

I'm the editor for the SQL standard (including both SQL-92 and the more 
recent SQL:1999).

SQL-92 alone was certainly not Turing complete.  With the addition of 
SQL/PSM (a/k/a PSM-96), a language something like Oracle's PL/SQL or 
Sybase's and Microsoft's Transact-SQL, one had Turing 
completeness.  SQL:1999 still has SQL/PSM as part of the standard, so it 
remains Turing complete.

However, PSM was intended to be data-management friendly, not necessarily 
computationally friendly, so I'd consider it an interesting challenge to 
emulate XSLT in it.  Nonetheless, I'm positive that it could be done.

Generation of PDF would be another interesting challenge, but PDF is *not* 
required to be in "binary" form...that's just how most of us produce it, 
since the compressed version is usually more efficient from the storage 
point of view.

Hope this helps,
   Jim

At 05:06 PM 2002-07-11 -0500 Thursday, Hunsberger, Peter wrote:

> > > Someone told me that he can do *any* XSLT transformation in SQL.
> >
> > Otherwise known as Church's thesis (or following Church, Turing
> > completeness). Any computer language that has arithmetic and enough
> > memory at its disposal can emulate any other. It's just not always very
> > convenient to program everything in a turing machhine.
>
> But there's the rub; SQL 92 and 96 own their own are not Turing complete...
> One of the design objectives for SQL 3 was that it be Turing complete, but I
> don't know if this was ever met?
>
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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Jim Melton --- Editor of ISO/IEC 9075-* (SQL)     Phone: +1.801.942.0144
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