What happens if the OSX partition is deleted?

So here is a question that has come up. Please bear with me and forget the "Why??!" for a minute.

If someone were to go into a boot-camped XP and deleted the main OSX partition leaving the smaller 200 GPT Protective Partition alone , would the mac still boot to XP?

I understand that OSX would no longer boot, but was curious if the XP install would still function normally without OSX.

Thanks