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Re: limits of the generic

• To: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
• Subject: Re: limits of the generic
• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 09:28:35 -0600
• Cc: Joe English <jenglish@f...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: Message from Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...> of "Sat, 28 Sep 2002 07:35:16 EDT." <5.1.0.14.0.20020928072413.05180ec8@n...>
• Sender: uche.ogbuji@f...

> As for XPath, I think that the *lack* of datatypes made XPath 1.0 do an 
> awful lot of guessing, and in an attempt to keep things simple, it said 
> that ALL numbers are floating point numbers. I don't think that the lack of 
> datatypes in the data XPath 1.0 used made things simpler or more 
> straightforward, it led to baroque rules for guessing types.

This is empirically refuted by the most casual observation of the specs.  The 
XPath 1.0 spec is less than 20% of the size of draft XPath 2.0, which adds 
data types.

XPath's rules actually make a lot of sense in practice, and I think you misuse 
the word "baroque".  The addition of data types is what would make XPath 
baroque.  You may disagree with some of the built-in coercion rules but I 
don't see how anyone could say they are baroque.  And then again, I think you 
are in a minority when it comes to opinion on whether XPath 1.0's data typing 
is more problematic that WXS data typing.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Apache 2.0 API - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-apache/
Python&XML column: Tour of Python/XML - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/09/18/py.
html
Python/Web Services column: xmlrpclib - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/w
ebservices/library/ws-pyth10.html

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  • Re: limits of the generic
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>

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