- From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com>
- Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:37:48 -0500
- To: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- CC: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>, "'Michael Rys'" <mrys@microsoft.com>, public-qt-comments@w3.org
Sandro Hawke wrote: > What's wrong with implementing and providing them? If someone wants to > compare two numbers, why should they not use a function identified as > op:numeric-greater-than ? > Hi Sandro, I think the purpose of using XPath is to refer to something that already exists, and there is no namespace for these operators. The reason there is no namespace for these operators is that the Working Group did not intend them for external use, but as a way of documenting the semantics of our language's operators. The operators of XPath have a simple syntactic representation, e.g. > means greater than. The rest of the world currently refers to this as >, not as op:greater-than or some XQueryX construct. > Yes, this may be the key motivator. RIF (at this level) does not want > polymorphism. We want to say numeric-greater-than and > dateTime-less-than and have them be different. For one thing, we may > want to require some of them but not others in a given profile/dialect, > and have their presense/absence be obvious from the syntax. > Wouldn't people have to look up which of these functions you provide anyway? One way to do this would be to emulate the operator mapping table in XQuery/XPath: http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/#mapping Jonathan
Received on Wednesday, 5 March 2008 18:38:23 UTC