How about a scripting language that manipulates XML natively, allowing a document's structure to be navigated, queried and modified using a familiar ECMAscript-like syntax?

Native XML scripting does just this, and frankly the following code:

function calcTotal(order) { var total = 0; for (var item in order.item) total += item.price * item.quantity;

return total; }

is soo much more readable than the XSLT equivalent. Interesting!