RE: [XQuery] "Cartesian product"

(Personally, I think the whole "tuple stream" model of explaining FLWOR
expressions is an unnecessary complication, but I doubt that I could
convince you to abandon it.)

I agree. The only situation where the "tuple stream" idea is actually
necessary is to explain ORDER BY: all other situations can be described
in terms of a nested iteration (which is how "for" expressions, but not
"some" and "every" expressions, are described in the XPath version of
the document).

After reading your note, I'm now inclined to suspect that ORDER BY is
flawed. I have never been convinced that there is a genuine use case for
sorting on values that can't be computed from the items in the output
sequence.

Getting rid of tuple streams would be really nice, because tuples don't
exist in the data model and it's ugly to use them internally when they
aren't available externally.

Michael Kay (speaking personally) 

Received on Friday, 13 February 2004 05:12:59 UTC