RE: F&O collation arguments

The WGs discussed your comment on 9/15/2003 and confirmed that
collations arguments to functions do not have to be literals.  All
function parameters named $collationLiteral will be renamed $collation
so as not to give this false impression.  Thank you for your comment.

All the best, Ashok

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-qt-comments-request@w3.org [mailto:public-qt-comments-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Bas de Bakker
> Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2003 2:43 AM
> To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
> Subject: F&O collation arguments
> 
> 
> Dear WG,
> 
> All functions that take a collation specify the argument as
> "$collationLiteral".  This suggest that a literal is required, but I
can
> find no text stating this explicitly.  If you indeed mean to require
> this, I do not agree.
> 
> 1) Requiring a collation argument to be a literal makes it impossible
> for the user to define an XQuery function that takes a collation as a
> parameter and uses it in a call to a standard function.  This severely
> limits the possibilities of creating generic string manipulation
> functions.
> 
> 2) Obviously, calls with a literal collation are easier to optimize.
> However, this is no reason to require a literal.  There are lots of
> cases in XQuery and other languages where an expression using a
constant
> is easier to optimize, but still a constant is not required.  It is
easy
> for the optimizer to only perform a specific optimization if the
> argument is indeed a literal.
> 
> If I am mistaken and you do not require a literal collation argument,
> you should change the name of those parameters into $collation for
> clarity.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Bas de Bakker
> X-Hive Corporation
>

Received on Wednesday, 1 October 2003 09:39:59 UTC