[Bug 10074] Missing operator definitions

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10074





--- Comment #1 from Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>  2010-07-03 11:42:42 ---
You are quite right to point this out: I have always thought it was something
of an oddity.

For "and" and "or", I suspect the original justification was that these
operators in XPath 1.0 had short-cut semantics, which means they were not pure
functions of their arguments. However, the semantics changed over time and this
argument is no longer valid.

For the operators "/", "[]", and "()", the translation into functions produces
higher-order functions which could not be represented in the 2.0/1.0 model.
They can be represented now, so again this justification has probably
disappeared. (But the function-call operator "()" is still a little challenging
to describe this way since the number of arguments is unbounded.)

The other side of the coin, however, is to question whether the mechanism of
mapping operators to functions really serves any useful didactic purpose. It
was quite handy in the early days before we decided which functions should have
an operator syntax and which should only be available as function calls, but
that's history.

-- 
Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the QA contact for the bug.

Received on Saturday, 3 July 2010 11:42:44 UTC