- The syntax we have at xsharp.org is an alternative C-like syntax (which we are still working on BTW). The full XML way of coding X# can be seen at http://wiki.codeglide.com/X_Sharp/Examples.
- Rules to convert non-XML structures to XML are defined by the connectors. We've chosen an intuitive XML structure to represent non-XML data on these connectors. Of course you can't guess what is the structure an XML that represents an e-mail has to have, but this is the same in other programming languages, you need documentation or an IDE with inline help to find out how to do stuff. The most powerful feature of X# is that you can combine data from unlimited and different sources using XPath and that instead of using multiple functions all actions are abstracted behind common operations such as append, remove, select and update.
- Yes, <?xpath ?> is used on the XML syntax to select nodes.
Originally X# was going to be a language to create applications visually and we chose an XML syntax because each tag is represented by a visual element on screen. Since we are still working on the visual X# editor, we offer an alternate C-like syntax (which is not definitive).
Although X# is Turing complete, we are not proposing it as a general purpose programming language -- we know it has limitations, having this level of abstraction has trade offs. Of course if we need to write a 3D Adventure Game or a Web Server we will use another language, but for writing the web based applications we wrote it has proven to be extremely fast and useful.
--mark at X#