[XQuery] A.1.1 Grammar Notes: lt

XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language
W3C Working Draft 12 November 2003

A.1.1 Grammar Notes
grammar-note: lt

"Token disambiguation of the overloaded '<' pattern"

    Why do you call "<" an "overloaded" pattern? Is it the fact that it
    occurs in more than one place in the grammar? There are about 24
    such patterns. So why single out "<"?

    Moreover, the leading-lone-slash restriction ensures that there is
    no ambiguity around the "<" pattern, so there is no (further)
    disambiguation to do.

"The "<" comparison operator can not occur in the same places as a "<"
tag open pattern. The "<" comparison operator can only occur in the
OPERATOR state and the "<" tag open pattern can only occur in the
DEFAULT and the ELEMENT_CONTENT states."

    Note that even if they *could* occur in the same state, it wouldn't
    matter, because the A.2.2 machine doesn't distinguish the two cases;
    it simply reports an instance of the "<" pattern.

-Michael Dyck

Received on Sunday, 15 February 2004 20:43:57 UTC