FW: Issue: bracket-overload

I'm pleased to see "bracket-overload" raised as an issue in section 2.2, and
since the question is asked, "what can be done about this?", I offer a
suggestion.

I see this as a significant potential cause of user errors, given that in
nearly all other contexts, strings are converted automatically to numbers
when the context requires it.

My vote would be to use [] for boolean predicates and "!" as a subscripting
operator, so one could write "foo[position()=3]" or "foo!3"; "foo[1]" would
then mean "foo[boolean(1)]" , while "foo!'3'" would mean the same as
"foo!3".

Mike Kay

Received on Wednesday, 14 July 1999 12:49:51 UTC