ORA-FO-337-E: Unclear wording: "the collation may fail", "the system may reject it"

SECTION 7.5 : Functions based on substring matching

Regarding collations that do not support collation units, the 
last sentence before the table in this section says "Such a 
collation may fail, or give unexpected results and the system 
may reject it."

What is meant by "the collation may fail"?  The collation is 
not a thing that can fail; it is just a subroutine that is called
with certain defined arguments and mechanically gives a result.
Perhaps you mean "the collation may not do what you expect it to
do", but that is expressed better by the next clause, "or give
unexpected results".  Perhaps you mean "the collation may go into
an infinite loop" which I guess would be a kind of failure, though
based on my understanding of collations, this seems remote.
More likely, you do not mean "the collation may fail", you mean
"the function will not achieve its design goal."

Moving on, what is meant by "the system may reject it"?  First, who is "the system"?  Is it the XQuery processor?  Second question: what does "reject" mean?  Does it mean "raise an exception"?  If not, what
happens when the system rejects it?

- Steve B.

Received on Tuesday, 17 February 2004 14:10:41 UTC