Comments on Editor's Draft 9 January 2008

Hi all,

I have encountered some more topics in the specification (Editor's Draft
9 January 2008) that are not entirely clear to me. Here is a list of my
questions/comments:

1. Section 4.7.1 (options). From the schema (rng) it looks like the
shortcut form can only be used for atomic steps and "other" compound
steps. Why isn't it possible to use the shortcut form also on built-in
compound steps (such as for-each or group) which can specify options in
the "long" form?

2. Because of the changes in the way the steps/pipelines are declared,
the step declaration can now contain logs or serializations. For
pipelines this is fine, but is it OK to declare logs/serializations for
atomic steps? If so, the specification should mention this and it should
also define how the logs/serializations can be used on atomic steps (for
instance, only declared logs/serializations can be used; the declared
logs/serializations will be used unless overriden in the "invocation";
etc.)

3. p:xquery step: I wonder if the XPath extension functions
(p:system-property(), p:iteration-position() etc) shouldn't also be
available the p:xquery step?

Also, I assume that the parameters that appear on the parameter input of
the p:xquery step should be used for setting values of XQuery external
variables. However, the specification of the p:xquery step does not
mention this.

4. Section 4.3 (p:viewport). I think the description of the match
expression should say that the expression cannot match an attribute
node. Or does viewport support replacing of attributes?

5.Section 4.1 (p:pipeline): "All p:pipeline pipelines have an implicit
primary input port named "source' and an implicit primary output port
named "result". Any input or output ports that the p:pipeline declares
explicitly are in addition to those ports and may not be declared
primary."

So, is it allowed to explicitly specify the implicit input/output ports
inside p:pipeline? If so, is it possible to redefine their properties
(primary, sequence)? Is the following permitted?

<p:pipeline>
  <p:input port="source" sequence="false"/>
  <p:output port="result" primary="false"/>
  <p:output port="result2" primary="true"/>
  ...
</p:pipeline>

6. Section 4.1 (p:pipeline). Pipelines can no longer specify the "name"
attribute. How does that work together with section 3.2 (Scoping of
Names). Is the sentence "All the step types in a pipeline must have
unique names: it is a static error (err:XS0036) if any step type name is
built-in and/or declared or defined more than once in the same scope."
still valid?


--
Vojtech Toman
Principal Software Engineer
EMC Corporation

Aert van Nesstraat 45
3012 CA Rotterdam
The Netherlands

Toman_Vojtech@emc.com

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2008 16:33:23 UTC