- From: Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@icl.com>
- Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 13:58:31 -0000
- To: "'www-xpath-comments@w3.org'" <www-xpath-comments@w3.org>
- Cc: "'Scott_Boag/CAM/Lotus@lotus.com'" <Scott_Boag/CAM/Lotus@lotus.com>
The XPath specification has little to say about the semantics of the unary minus operator, it seems to be covered by the remark that "The - operator performs subtraction." Saxon therefore interprets unary minus as subtraction from zero, so -0 means (+0.0 subtract +0.0) which is (I think) positive zero. LotusXSL appears to treat XPath "-0" as meaning IEEE 754 negative zero, which seems natural, but I cannot find any justification for this in the spec. The Java language spec explicitly states that the floating point unary minus operator does NOT mean subtraction, it means inverting the sign. There doesn't seem to be any corresponding statement in XPath. Should "-0" in XPath be interpreted as positive zero or negative zero? Mike Kay
Received on Monday, 13 December 1999 08:58:41 UTC