Subject: Re: [xsl] Re: What is the best way to cast integer to string in XSLT2? From: Jeni Tennison <jeni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 22:09:00 +0100 |
Hi Dimitre, > Do any examples exist when such implicit casting would be > dangerous/counter-intuitive? If not, then it would be very useful to > allow implicit casting to string. I agree, but then I think that it would be useful to allow implicit casting to a required type, whatever it is, if such a cast is permitted. Those that support strong typing in XPath 2.0, on the other hand, believe that it's useful to be told that you can't use an integer where a string is expected. There are lots of cases where there *is* implicit casting (of xdt:untypedAtomic values) in XPath 2.0 and that casting is counter-intuitive (to XPath 1.0 users). For example: @height > @weight casts both attributes to strings and compares them lexicographically, rather than doing a numeric comparison as in XPath 1.0, while: current-dateTime() + @delay (where @delay is "PT30M", for example) will give you a type error because the delay attribute is cast to an xs:double (even though you can't actually add an xs:double to an xs:dateTime) and "PT30M" isn't a valid double value. Similarly: 24 idiv (@indent + 3) will give you a type error because the indent attribute is cast to an xs:double, which means the result of (@indent + 3) is an xs:double, which isn't a valid type for an operand to idiv. Which I guess goes to show that implicit casting coupled with polymorphic operators will always give some weird results. > In cases like the current one I think such "conversion constructors" > should be specified in the XPath data model. This makes writing and > understanding a program much more easier. The rules for casting between types are specified in the XPath/XQuery Functions & Operators document (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions). As I said above, personally I don't see why these rules can't be used for implicit casting, but this seems to go against the strong typing ethos of XPath 2.0. Cheers, Jeni --- Jeni Tennison http://www.jenitennison.com/ XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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