The article deals with the denotational semantics of a special query language called XML-Lambda, which is based on the simply typed lambda calculus. The exact semantics allows experimentation with a language de nition, prototyping of programs, and similar experiments.
One of such experiment is the implementation of the XQuery language in the XML-Lambda environment. The main advantage of our approach is the possibility of a query optimizations in the XML-Lambda intermediate form.
It is much more easier than optimizations based on the offcial W3C semantics. XML-Lambda is a part of more complex XML-Lambda Framework which serves for experimenting with the tools for XML processing.