Re: Saxonica Comment 7 on XProc last-call draft, sections 1 and 2

/ Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> was heard to say:
| / Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> was heard to say:
| | But this (a) means rewriting the stylesheet (perhaps quite extensively - for
| | example it means that keys change their scope), and (b) almost certainly
| | cannot be implemented as efficiently, especially if one of the documents
| | contains lookup values that form an input to many transformations.

I'm sympathetic. 

And it looks fairly easy to change, actually. Unlike options, parameters
are never accessed by the pipeline processor itself. 

Computing the string value means doing all the work of calculating the
input documents, getting the component graph right, evaluating the
expression after the input is available, etc. and then taking the
string value before passing it to the step.

What would be the harm in passing it to the step *without* taking the
string value first?

I'd be willing to leave the ability to pass non-string values as
implementation defined, I think. With a dynamic error if you attempt
to do so in an implementation that can't.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Everything should be made as simple as
http://nwalsh.com/            | possible, but no simpler.