Recently W3C has published new drafts for xquery 1.1 and for xpath 2.1. We have noticed that committee has decided to introduce inline functions both for the xquery and for the xpath.

That's a really good news! This way xquery, xpath and xslt are being approached the Object Oriented Programming the way of javascript with its inline functions.

Now we shall be able to implement tuples (a sequence of items wrapped into single item), object with named properties, trees (e.g. RB Tree), associative containers (tree maps and hash maps, sets).

Surely, all this will be in the spirit of functional programming.

The only thing we regret about is that the WG did not include built-in implementations for trees and associative containers, as we don't believe that one can create an efficient implementation of these abstractions neither in xquery nor in xslt (asymptotically results will be good, but coefficients will be painful).

See also: Tuple and maps