Subject: Re: Regular expression functions (Was: Re: [xsl] comments on December F&O draft) From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 13:59:03 GMT |
> I think that in both cases returning different trees would be more > consistent, It's consistent with xslt tree creatuion but inconsistent with side-effect free function semantics which are there at least in part so that you can optimise and re-order function calls. f(x) + f(x) is the same as 2 * f(x) so long as f isn't doing anything nasty like incrementing a global variable counting how many times it was called. It's the same with Xpath functions (and is presumably why document() is explictly defined to return the same tree if called twice with the same argument, even if the url that's used is pointing at some dynamic content). Here if f is returning a tree (that is, a sequence of one item, which contains a node) and it's not true that f(x) == f(x) then it means that an optimiser can't replace x == x by true() for any expression x. This is the sort of thing that's supposed to be easier with the stronger typing from Xquery, not harder. > For example, given the problems that I described about processing x,y > coordinates as pairs, there's a strong temptation to create pairs of > coordinates as 'coordinate' elements with 'x' and 'y' attributes, > rather than a simple sequence of integers. If sequences could be > nested, I wouldn't feel that temptation. Yes I agree strongly with this, the no-nesting restriction is probably the strangest part of Xpath2 and there's no justification given for it in the drafts as far as I can see. There may well be a justification, but I haven't seen one in the drafts (not that I've read every page yet). David _____________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by Star Internet delivered through the MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service. For further information visit http://www.star.net.uk/stats.asp or alternatively call Star Internet for details on the Virus Scanning Service. XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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