Re: Identity Component

On 2/1/07, Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@sun.com> wrote:
>
> / Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.org> was heard to say:
> | If we don't allow identity to process sequences, then an author has
> | to do different things to setup and identity step or placeholder
> depending
> | on where they are in their pipeline.  I think that will make things
> | difficult for the pipeline author to understand.
>
> But they'll have to do those different things for the other components
> (xslt, validate, xinclude) why is the identity component special in
> this regard?



Those component have well defined semantics in terms of the
specification they are implementing.

In the case of the identity component, my thought was that we *define*
it to take and produce sequences.  Then it isn't iteration because that
is what it does.


-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics