A Comment About Comments (XQuery Comments)

I was checking some of the SQL Server 2005 features on the way over on the plane. The latest build that I have is SQL Express build, fairly recent. Many of the XQuery features have been updated to Nov 2003 XQuery spec. Very cool. But comments wasn't one of them. A nit, I know.

The {– a comment –} style comments still work when using SQL Server XQuery but the new style, smiley-face comments (: a comment 🙂 don't. They generate a syntax error.

Now I *liked* the old style comments (don't like to see my code grin at me, call me sensitive), but the smiley-face ones are part of the spec revision, unless I'm missing something. And they are supported in the client-side System.Data.SqlXml's XQueryCommand dialect of XQuery. That's even more puzzling because the two dialects (SQL Server and System.Data.SqlXml) are synchronized in other ways. For example, System.Data.SqlXml no longer supports the XQuery “LET” verb and has compile-time strong type checking like SQL Server.

I lag in reporting things I find, because I know beta 2 is still a work in progress. Thought it would be added. All of the book examples have the smiley face comments, just do “find and replace” if you run 'em. Beta 2 still isn't out yet, maybe… 🙂

2 thoughts on “A Comment About Comments (XQuery Comments)”

Michael Rys says:

July 27, 2004 at 9:14 pm

As you probably know by now, this was an oversight that we plan to fix in beta3.
Bob Beauchemin says:

July 28, 2004 at 6:12 am

Didn’t know this and it did take me by surprise. Glad its on the list.

Comments are closed.

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