Re: [xsl] W3C Specification of fn:filter() -- is this a bug in the document or in Saxon?

["Michael Kay mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The "errors and optimization" rule in XPath says that processors can quite
legitimately rewrite one expression with another that has different resource
requirements and that therefore has different failure characteristics. This is
by design. It means that either of these formulations could fail with a stack
overflow, and in that sense they are indeed equivalent.

I'm aware that some languages have attempted to formulate rules in the
language semantics making tail call optimization mandatory. The XSL and XQuery
WGs considered several times whether to try and make the whole "errors and
optimization" rules more formal and rigorous, and we decided we didn't have
the skills and resources to do it, for the same reason that work on the XQuery
formal semantics was abandoned.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

> On 9 Sep 2019, at 02:44, Dimitre Novatchev dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >  You can never guarantee that two expressions are equivalent in your
> > sense, because of "errors and optimization". Any construct might raise
> > an error - in the case of this example, stack overflow if the recursion
> > gets too deep.
>
> What about tail-recursion?
>
> For years we have known recursive expressions whose tail-recursiveness is
correctly recognized in BaseX and it provides correct evaluation regardless of
the input size (recursion depth) but other processors fail miserably...
>
> How much value for the developers would have been provided by the
specification if it mandated proper handling of tail-recursion!!!
>
> The value provided in a document is rather debatable when specifying
"equivalent implementations" that blow up for reasonably long inputs (several
thousand items isn't too high!) when other implementations could have been
provided that demonstrate equivalence with much longer inputs (millions of
items)
>
> Also, why in an XPath specification give "equivalent implementations" in two
different languages neither of which is XPath?
>
> Cheers,
> Dimitre
>
> On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 5:54 PM Liam R. E. Quin liam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:liam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> On Mon, 2019-09-09 at 00:18 +0000, Dimitre Novatchev
> dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The W3C F&O 3.1 spec (at
> > https://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions-31/#func-filter
<https://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions-31/#func-filter> ) says:
> >
> > Rules
> >
> > The effect of the function is equivalent to the following
> [...]
> >
> > Because "equivalent" means the two functions must produce the same
> > result
> > for for all possible values in the same set of arguments,
>
> That is one possible definition of "equivalent" but it is not the one
> used in the Functions and Operators document...
>
> You can never guarantee that two expressions are equivalent in your
> sense, because of "errors and optimization". Any construct might raise
> an error - in the case of this example, stack overflow if the recursion
> gets too deep.
>
> Liam
>
> --
> Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
<https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/>
> Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
> XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
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<http://www.fromoldbooks.org/>
>
>
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Dimitre Novatchev
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