[Bug 11171] [XQuery11] dynamic errors reported during static analysis

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11171

--- Comment #5 from Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> 2010-10-30 20:54:44 UTC ---
>That paragraph originally only mentioned type errors (actually, it /originally/
talked about "type-related warnings", but then shifted to type errors), but
dynamic errors have been there since 2005-03-28.

That explains a lot. At any rate, it explains why the rules for XSLT and XQuery
are different - XSLT has never allowed dynamic errors to be reported early
except as an optimization when they would inevitably be reported anyway.

In considering early reporting of dynamic errors, we should look not only at
compile-time reporting of such errors, but also at the closely related problem
of premature dynamic reporting. For example

let $N := count(//orders)
for $x in 1 to $N return $x + 1 div $N

should not fail in the case where $N=0, but the XQuery rules allow the
implementation to raise an error here.  (Because of the infamous sentence
"Other than the raising or not raising of errors, the result of evaluating an
equivalent expression must be the same as the result of evaluating the original
expression.")

Really this is no different from the conditional expression case: it should not
be necessary for users to rewrite this as

if ($N = 0) 
then () 
else for $x in 1 to $N return $x + 1 div $N 

I think that with the advent of try/catch, we need to get much stricter about
such matters. Experience with the test suite has shown that this area is a
frequent cause of interoperability problems even without try/catch.

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Received on Saturday, 30 October 2010 20:54:46 UTC