ORA-SE-291-E: Term "empty string" is a poor choice of words

SECTION 2: Serializing arbitrary data models

The introductory paragraph says that the result of each
step should be another sequence.  Step 1 says "Replace an 
empty sequence with a zero-length string."  The term 
"empty string" is a poor choice of terminology.  a 
"string" might be either a text node or an atomic value of
type xs:string.  Since text nodes 
are not allowed to have length zero, you must mean an xs:string
value of length 0.  You could save your readers the trouble
of making these deductions (by possibly missing the fact
that a text node can not be empty) by simply saying
"Replace the empty sequence by an atomic value of type
xs:string and length 0".

- Steve B.

Received on Thursday, 19 February 2004 01:22:47 UTC