F&O collation arguments

Dear WG,

All functions that take a collation specify the argument as
"$collationLiteral".  This suggest that a literal is required, but I can
find no text stating this explicitly.  If you indeed mean to require
this, I do not agree.

1) Requiring a collation argument to be a literal makes it impossible
for the user to define an XQuery function that takes a collation as a
parameter and uses it in a call to a standard function.  This severely
limits the possibilities of creating generic string manipulation
functions.

2) Obviously, calls with a literal collation are easier to optimize.
However, this is no reason to require a literal.  There are lots of
cases in XQuery and other languages where an expression using a constant
is easier to optimize, but still a constant is not required.  It is easy
for the optimizer to only perform a specific optimization if the
argument is indeed a literal.

If I am mistaken and you do not require a literal collation argument,
you should change the name of those parameters into $collation for
clarity.

Regards,

Bas de Bakker
X-Hive Corporation

Received on Tuesday, 24 June 2003 05:42:55 UTC