[Bug 8221] deterministic / stable

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8221


Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|ASSIGNED                    |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |FIXED




--- Comment #2 from Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com>  2010-09-03 21:46:50 ---
Here is the resolution from the Oxford face-to-face:

DECISION - execution scope is the status quo (e.g. in F&O) and is adopted
e.g. for top-level evaluation of a query or transformation.

[long discussion of terms]

DECISION - deterministic and nondeterministic [[
    A fn is deterministic if all calls within an execution scope
    and with identical arguments return an identical result.
    That result may be implementation defined/depedent
    (e.g. in the order of items in a sequence)

    If the function is dependent on the dynamic context, we
    regard it as deterministic treating that part of the context
    as an implicit argument, so if the context and arguments are
    the same the result must be the same.

    All other functions is non-deterministic.

    Side-effecting and determinism are orthogonal
]]


focus-dependent/independent or
      problem - focus has a defined meaning that's more specific

context-dependent/independent not also needed

DECISION [[
      A function is focus-dependent if it needs access to the
      current focus, otherwise it's focus-independent

      A function is context-dependent if it needs access to
      the dynamic context - e.g. doc(), current-dateTime().
      This is a superset of focus-dependent functions.
      Otherwise it's context-independent.

      All focus-dependent functions are also context-dependent.
]]


ACTION A-444-03: editors to use these terms (execution scope,
deterministic/non-deterministic, focus-dependent/focus-independent,
context-dependent, context-independent) to classify the existing
functions and to express stable/deterministic in terms of them.

Note - updating functions are not inherently non-deterministic,
but have an implicit extra return value.

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Received on Friday, 3 September 2010 21:46:52 UTC