When considering the past or the future, dear apprentice, be mindful of the present. If, while considering the past, you become caught in the past, lost in the past, or enslaved by the past, then you have forgotten yourself in the present. If, while considering the future, you become caught in the future, lost in the future, or enslaved by the future, then you have forgotten yourself in the present. Conversely, when considering the past, if you do not become caught, lost, or enslaved by the past, then you have remained mindful of the present. And if, when considering the future, you do not become caught, lost, or enslaved in the future, then you have remained mindful of the present. [14] Programmers in the real world wrestle everyday to overcome the impedance mismatch between relational data, objects, and XML. We have been working on solving this problem for the past ten years by applying principles from functional programming, in particular monads and comprehensions. By viewing data as monads and formulating queries as comprehensions, it becomes possible to unify the three data models and their corresponding programming languages instead of considering each as a separate special case. To actually bring this within the reach of mainstream programmers we have worked tirelessly on transferring functional programming technology from pure Haskell, via Cω to the upcoming versions of C ♯ 3.0 and Visual Basic 9 and the LINQ framework. Functional programming has finally reached the masses, except that it is called Visual Basic instead of Lisp,

We take the term X/O impedance mismatch to describe the difficulty of the OO paradigm to accommodate XML processing by means of recasting it to typed OO programming. In particular, given XML types (say, XML schemas), it is notoriously difficult to map them automatically to object types (say, object models) that (i) reasonably compare to native object types typically devised by OO developers; (ii) fully preserve the intent of the original XML types; (iii) fully support round-tripping of arbitrary, valid XML data; and (iv) provide a general and convenient programming model for XML data hosted by objects. We reveal the X/O impedance mismatch in particular detail. That is, we survey the relevant differences between XML and objects in terms of their data models and their type systems. In this process, we systematically record and assess Xto-O mapping options. Our illustrations employ XSD (1.0) as the XML-schema language of choice and C# (1.0–3.0) as the bound of OO language expressiveness.

‘LINQ to XSD ’ is the code name of an incubation project at Microsoft that investigates a typed XML processing approach for.NET and LINQ. The LINQ to XSD technology comes essentially in the form of a mapping tool that takes XML schemas (in fact, XSD schemas) as input and maps them canonically to.NET types that serve as typed views on XML trees (to be precise: XML trees of the LINQ to XML API). These typed views are also called ‘XML objects ’ so as to differentiate them from ‘plain objects’. The LINQ to XSD technology also provides some elements of Visual Studio integration. The LINQ to XSD programming model supports functional-programming-like (say, LINQ-like) queries, expressionoriented tree construction, OO-like tree updates, and operations for mediation between typed views and untyped trees. 1. Background ‘LINQ to XSD ’ is the code name of an incubation project at Microsoft that investigates a typed XML processing approach for.NET and LINQ. The LINQ to XSD technology comes essentially