RE: Timezones in get-hours-from-dateTime etc.

> 
> In the respect of completeness, I would like to mention again 
> the necessity of constructors for date/time types that accept 
> numeric arguments like
> 
>           xs:date( $year as integer, $month as integer, $day 
> as integer,
>                    $timezone as ? )
> 
>           xs:time( $hours as integer, $minutes as integer, 
> $seconds as double,
> 		  $timezone ? )
> 
> This is the reciprocal of component extractors and allows any 
> computation.

I agree that there seems to be a reasonably strong case for these functions.
> 
> 
> To help "unbloating" - at least from users point of view - 
> there is also still the possibility to collapse function names like
>     get-hours-from-dayTimeDuration,
>     get-hours-from-dateTime,
>     get-hours-from-time...
> into one overloaded 'get-hours'
> same way for other functions get-*** etc.
> 

My last attempt to propose such a change failed, largely on the grounds that
it's better to define the type checking through the function signatures than
in ad-hoc semantic rules.

Michael Kay