Re: ORA-XQ-409-B: Introduce identity-less operations as a feature

>  Include a static context flag that specifies whether node identities 
> need to be preserved. If the option is true, then no node based 
> operations such as "is", "<<" , ">>" etc.. should be allowed. Further 
> this could also restrict non-forward axes like parent(), sibling(), 
> root(), etc..

Steve,

we are sympathetic to the goal. However, the main problem is not 
generated by those
operators but by the implicit sorting by document order and duplicate 
elimination embedded
in the semantics of path expressions. As a result of those implicit 
operations the simple path
expressions also require node identifiers.

Best regards,
Dana