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W. E. Perry wrote: > > I'm sorry, Jonathan, I don't understand. What is > > return $stock/price / ($stock/revenues - $stock/expenses) > > except the execution of subtraction and division arithmetic > operations agains t the 'values' of $stock/price, > $stock/revenues, and $stock/expenses? And if your query > is against XML, then the values of those i tems are > runs of Unicode text, and your arithmetic operations > are effectively meaningless. Not necessarily: the infix operator "-" can easily be defined as an operation on strings. Parse the left and right operands as numbers (raising an error if they're not syntactically valid), subtract one from the other, then format the result as a string. That's precisely how Tcl works. That's why I find Tcl eminently suitable for processing SGML: "everything is a string" is a mantra that works in both worlds. (And no, contrary to popular belief, this doesn't make Tcl horribly inefficient.) I don't know if XQuery works that way -- haven't kept up with the spec. XPath does, sort of, except that it has IEEE floating point as a built-in data type in addition to strings and that complicates things a bit. --Joe English jenglish@f...
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