[basex-talk] eval evil?

Musing on the the usefulness of actions that update the database and return something, specifically in a web server with Xforms context, and the absence of XQuery scripting. I have been playing around with things like the following:

let $s:=util:eval(' let $x:=copy $c:=db:open("listman","1.xml") modify (replace value of node $c/updated with current-dateTime()) return $c return db:replace("listman","1.xml",$x) ') return db:open("listman","1.xml")

This works, but is it likely to stop working in the future? Is there a better way?

/Andy