Re: [xsl] things about grouping

[Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>3. If you group-starting-with it's weird to then see things not 
encompassed by the starting-with expression appear as a group because 
they precede the first occurrence of the starting-with expression. While 
this works as specified because for-each-group is a total function over 
the population it does result in a mismatch between the grammatical 
semantic and the exhibited behaviour, or to put it another way it does 
what it says in the spec but doesn't do what it says on the tin.

Finding element and attribute names that enable people to guess the 
semantics without reading the spec is not always easy. Som programming 
languages get around this by using operators like ~:< whose semantics 
you can't even attempt to guess...

The moral is, don't use any construct in any programming language 
without reading the spec.

Michael Kay
Saxonica