Are there any programming languages that support xml natively?

Question

If there are any then how deeply is xml integrated into language? What primitives are used to manipulate xml document?

PS. I'm not interested in declarative languages such as SQL, XPath, XSLT :)

Answer 1

Powershell has some niceties in dealing with XML, mainly that a node gets dynamic properties representing its sub-nodes. So given the XML

<foo>
  <bar/>
  <bar/>
</foo>

an XML object created from this has a "foo" property and the object returned by that has a "bar" property.

> $x=[xml]"<foo><bar moo='meh'/><bar meow='bleh'/></foo>"
> $x.foo

bar
---
{bar, bar}

> $x.foo.bar[0]

moo
---
meh

> $x.foo.bar[1]

meow
----
bleh

Very handy at times.

Answer 2

Depends how you mean by deeply integrated? .net comes with an XML namespace and various classes for dealing with XML documents...

Answer 3

VB.NET 9.0 has XML literals which seems like what you're looking for. This example taken from Imran Shaik blog

    <WebMethod()> _
Public Function AllCountriesUsingXMLLiterals() As String

    Dim sud As New CountryDataSetTableAdapters.CountryTableTableAdapter

    Dim XDataSet As New CountryDataSet.CountryTableDataTable

    sud.Fill(XDataSet)

    Dim XDoc = _
        <Countries xmlns="http://tempuri.org/Schema/Countries"&gt;
            <%= From country In XDataSet Select <Country Code=<%= country.CountryISO %> Name=<%= country.CountryName %>/> %>
        </Countries>

    Return XDoc.ToString
End Function

Answer 4

Groovy and Scala have XML literal support, though I think this is generally a really stupid idea.

Answer 5

javascript，see here

Answer 6

I'd go with groovy since it integrates best with Java.

Answer 7

XQuery ? From the linked article:

XQuery provides the means to extract and manipulate data from XML documents or any data source that can be viewed as XML, such as relational databases or office documents.

It supports for-loops, whiles, let, ordering etc.

Answer 8

Flex and Action Script.

Answer 9

Flash's ActionScript 3.0 and JavaScript (ECMAScript languages) are also integrated with XML by E4X.
So code looks something like this (altough this is a simple example and cooler stuff is possible):

var sales = <sales vendor="John">
    <item type="peas" price="4" quantity="6"/>
    <item type="carrot" price="3" quantity="10"/>
    <item type="chips" price="5" quantity="3"/>
  </sales>;

alert( sales.item.(@type == "carrot").@quantity );
alert( sales.@vendor );
for each( var price in sales..@price ) {
  alert( price );
}

Here are Adobe's docs for working with XML in AS3.0.