ORA-XQ-059-B: XQuery expressions do not need to be written in Unicode

SECTION 2: Basics

First sentence: "... the expression, which is a sequence of Unicode
characters."  Certainly in order to support XML, an implementation
will need to support Unicode in its data values, but is this 
necessary in a source language expression?  SQL (ISO/IEC 9075)
distinguishes what it calls "the source language character set",
which is not necessarily the same as any character set in the 
data.  Of course, XQuery expressions can include literals for
Unicode strings, and XQueryX, being expressed in XML, is 
necessarily expressed in Unicode as well.  But wouldn't it be
sufficient for XQuery to allow the source language character set
to be any implementation-defined character set, provided there
was an implementation-defined mapping to convert the source 
language into Unicode?  For example, if a user is working in an
environment with EBCDIC or Shift-JIS editors, the user will
probably want to compose his XQuery expressions in those character
sets.

- Steve B.

Received on Monday, 16 February 2004 13:57:08 UTC