- From: Daniela Florescu <danielaf@bea.com>
- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:31:43 -0800
- To: Don Chamberlin <chamberl@almaden.ibm.com>
- Cc: public-qt-comments@w3.org
- Message-Id: <36E74C54-5CFB-11D8-9286-0003937198F4@bea.com>
Don, but in this new proposal, under which conditions would you apply sorting by doc order and duplicate elimination ? What if the dynamic answer contains a mixture of nodes and values? And what if the statically inferred type contains both nodes and values ? Don't you want to know at compile time if you have to do a sort or not ? I am not sure I understand the proposal as written. Best regards Dana On Feb 11, 2004, at 3:50 PM, Don Chamberlin wrote: > > (IBM-XQ-007) Section 3.2 (Path Expressions): The definition of a path > expression should be revised to remove the restriction that the > expression on the right side of "/" must return a sequence of nodes. > The restriction should be retained for the expression on the left side > of "/". In effect, this would permit the last step in a path to return > one or more atomic values. This feature has recently been requested by > Sarah Wilkin > (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004Feb/ > 0100.html) who proposes the following rule: When evaluating E1/E2, if > each evaluation of E2 returns a sequence of nodes, they are combined > in document order, removing duplicates; if each evaluation of E2 > returns a sequence of atomic values, the sequences are concatenated in > the order generated; otherwise a type error is raised. Like all type > errors, this error can be raised either statically or dynamically, > depending on the implementation. This rule provides well-defined > static and dynamic semantics for path expressions. > > To illustrate the usability advantages of this proposal, consider a > document containing "employee" elements, each of which has child > elements "dept", "salary", and "bonus". To find the largest total pay > (salary + bonus) of all the employees in the Toy department, here is > what I think many users will write: > > max( //employee[dept = "Toy"]/(salary + bonus) ) > > Unfortunately in our current language this is an error because the > final step in the path does not return a sequence of nodes. The user > is forced to write the following: > > max( for $e in //employee[dept = "Toy"] return ($e/salary + $e/bonus) ) > > This expression is complex and error-prone (users will forget the > parentheses or will forget to use the bound variables inside the > return clause). There is no reason why this query cannot be expressed > in a more straightforward way. Users will try to write it as a path > expression and will not understand why it fails. > > Another very common example is the use of data() to extract the typed > value from the last step in a path, as in this case: > //book[isbn="1234567"]/price/data(). This very reasonable expression > is also an error and the user is forced to write > data(//book[isbn="1234567"]/price). > > Note that I am NOT asking for a general-purpose mapping operator, > which I think is not in general needed since we already have a > for-expression. Instead, I think we should simply relax the unnatural > and unnecessary restriction that is currently placed on path > expressions. This will remove a frequent source of errors and will > improve the usefulness of path expressions, without precluding us from > introducing a general-purpose mapping operator later if a consensus > emerges to do so. > > --Don Chamberlin
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Received on Wednesday, 11 February 2004 20:31:18 UTC