Questions about XPath buildins

> *         Could it be possible to limit to functions with an easy
> implementation in main language? For example, the match function may be
> tricky to implement in a language where there is no libraries concerning
> regexp,

In my mind, things like regexp processing are so widely used and so
widely implemented that to not include them in the core does users a
real disservice.

> *         Up-to-now, I have not the time to check that the selected
> functions could be quickly implemented in Java, especially for the date
> types. Is it possible to have more time to perform this task?
> 
> *         Those functions are perfect to operate against an XML model.

I don't see where the XML comes through in these particular functions
we're talking about.

> However, most of our PR ruleset are not compliant with such a model
> since they use methods coming from Java libraries or user's libraries. I
> don't think we will be able to bind those methods and data on XML and
> XPath functions. Furthermore, even if it exists very similar methods in
> the Java library, some of them have a slightly different semantic. Take
> for example the '+' operator of Java which differs with 'op:numeric-add'
> from the way the overflow is processed.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but my understanding is that the XQuery
and XPath Working Groups put quite a bit of work into this, including
building many implementations on many platforms.  I'd be surprised if
there was anything that was particularly hard to implement, unless there
was a very good reason for it.  If you have specific issues, let me know
and I'll try to find out the design rationales behind them.

    -- Sandro

Received on Tuesday, 19 June 2007 20:44:21 UTC