Re: Sequence type and other related questions

Torsten,
     It does a little.

I am more interested in the usage of this within XPath than in XQuery. I 
am not sure whether this mailing list is the right one to use it is just 
it is referred to from the same page that refers to the XPath/XQuery 
model and functions / operators.

I cannot find anything within the XPath specifications that relate to 
this. The closest I found was the SequenceType but that does not appear 
to match what you describe below.

Torsten Grust wrote:
> Paul,
> 
>   does the following help?
> 
> On July 15 (11:03 +0100), Paul Duffin wrote with possible deletions:
> |
> | The section on sequences
> | (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-datamodel/#sequences) states that a sequence
> | that contains a single item is indistinguishable from the item itself.
> | Among other things this means that a sequence with one item in it has
> | the same type as that item. Therefore sequences must have types.
> |
> | This raises a couple of questions.
> |
> | What is the type of a sequence with two (or more) items in it which are
> | potentially different ?
> |
> | Is it just a generic sequence type, is it the type which is the closest
> | ancestor of all the item types, or something else ?
> 
> For two items x and y of types s and t, respectively, the sequence
> value (x,y) has type s,t.  Note that (.,.) (the ``comma'') is used as
> a binary type constructor in forming the type s,t.
> 
> As a derivation rule:
> 
>                     E |- x:s   E |- y:t
>                    ---------------------
>                      E |- (x,y) : s,t
> 
> 
> What you refer to above (``closest ancestor'') might be related to
> approximations of such sequence types:
> 
> The XQuery Formal Semantics sometimes compute (more or less rough)
> approximations of these types (e.g., during the typing of a for-bound
> variable).   An approximation of the type  s,t  is
> 
>                               (s | t)+
> 
> computed as
> 
>                         prime (s,t) quantifier (s,t)
>                         \_________/ \______________/
>                           = s | t        = +
> 
> Note that information about the order of s and t in the original type
> as well as information about the exact number of occurrences of s and
> t in the original type are lost.  We do however have
> 
>                             s,t <: (s | t)+
> 
> which ensures that typing the rest of program using the approximation
> is safe.
> 
> | What is the type of an empty sequence ?
> 
> The type of the empty sequence is the special type empty.
> 
> 
> Greetings,
>    --Torsten
> 
> --
>   | Dr. Torsten Grust                          Torsten.Grust@uni-konstanz.de |
>   |                                   http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/~grust/ |
>   | Database Research Group, University of Konstanz (Lake Constance/Germany) |
>   |             (Please avoid sending me MS Word or PowerPoint attachments.) |

Received on Tuesday, 15 July 2003 12:18:32 UTC