- From: Michael Brundage <xquery@comcast.net>
- Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 23:14:12 -0700
- To: Michael Kay <mhk@mhk.me.uk>, 'Igor Hersht' <igorh@ca.ibm.com>
- Cc: XQuery Public Comments <public-qt-comments@w3.org>, <ashokmalhotra@alum.mit.edu>, <Stephen.Buxton@oracle.com>
> I was hoping that by saying it is a mapping to a sequence of > integers then we can also imply some properties of functions like > contains(), for example that contains(A,B) is true if A=B is true, and that > startswith(A, B) implies A <= B. The mathematician in me is required to reply with a proof that contains() can never satisfy such a property. The problem is that equality is reflexive (symmetric), while string containment is not. Assume contains(A, B) is true if and only if collation(A) = collation(B) is true. Then consider any two strings A and B such that contains(A, B) is true but contains(B, A) is not (for example, "a" and "aa"). By the hypothesis, contains(A, B) implies collation(A)=collation(B), but then by the collation(B) = collation(A) so by hypothesis contains(B, A) is true, a contradiction. Therefore there cannot exist a collation for which contains(A, B) is true if and only if collation(A) = collation(B). [Note that this proof holds regardless of what value space the collation maps into.] Cheers, Michael Brundage xquery@comcast.net Author, XQuery: The XML Query Language (Addison-Wesley, 2004) Co-author, Professional XML Databases (Wrox Press, 2000)
Received on Thursday, 10 June 2004 02:14:52 UTC