- From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@softwareag.com>
- Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 16:30:17 -0500
- To: Shawn Vincent <svincent@exalt.com>, XQuery Comments <www-xml-query-comments@w3.org>
At 10:35 AM 1/14/2002 -0500, Shawn Vincent wrote: >Summary: The implicit semantics of '/' are unpleasant in many >circumstances. Please provide an alternative shorthand >operator that does simple projection. Hi Shawn, This issue has a long, verbose, and time consuming history in the discussions among Working Groups. Your proposal was independently proposed, and has been discussed in depth. The main argument against it was simply that relatively few people will understand the difference between / and \, especially as they produce the same result in most queries. Some people felt that using 'for' was more clear, if also more verbose. There was also some fear that we would develop two user communities, one that uses only / and another that uses only \, and these communities would not understand the subtle differences in behavior of their queries. This operator would be simple to add to a later version of the language if experience with users shows it to be needed. >In any case, compilers should issue a warning in cases where '/' is >used in ways that may destroy user-specified ordering. Perhaps. I'm not sure that this is always easy to report, I need to think about it. Jonathan These are my opinions right now. They may be quite different from the opinions of Software AG, the W3C XML Query Working Group, or the opinions that I will have after reading and considering your response.
Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2002 16:30:43 UTC