RE: [F&O] 15.1.8 fn:exists

> 
> Ashok,
> 
> Thanks for considering my comment.
> 
> > and it did not seem that a change in the
> > name of the function would benefit our users.
> 
> I am one of your users. How many other users did you contact 
> and got their feedback that this change in the name wouldn't 
> benefit them? If other users were not contacted then what is 
> the model of a user the WG has, on the basis of which your 
> conclusion was made?
> 

I don't think that naming decisions can be made by any democratic process;
on the contrary, it's probably true that the more people you involve, the
harder it is to achieve stylistic consistency. The names will never please
everyone. Neither of the names "exists" or "empty" is perfect, because they
both have other possible meanings (empty, in particular, is tricky because
people might think that empty($E) tests whether $E is an element with no
children). We felt in this case that brevity is more important than trying
to capture the entire semantics of the function in its name. We didn't feel
that the names you suggested were significantly more likely to be intuitive
to users than the existing names.

Michael Kay