Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: order of UNIONs

Hi David,

>>  <xsl:variable name="nodeSet"
>>                 select="$nodeSequence | $nodeSequence" />
>
> It's not just union ( | ) that has different semantics for lists.

As far as I can see in the public F&O WD, the only change to the
semantics of 'union' for XPath 2.0 is that it returns a node sequence
in document order rather than a node set with no order. I don't think
that its the 'ordering' of sequences that are the potential/perceived
problem, but rather the duplication of nodes within the sequence. So
in practical terms I don't think that the use of union in XPath 1.0
and XPath 2.0 is all that different, is it? The only slight
peculiarity is that you could easily get a union that contained fewer
nodes than either of the two sequences you were unioning.

> what would you guess
> select="count(*/..)"
> should be, given any semantics that you want to guess for sequences and
> for / (and for count() )
>
> In XPath 1.0, 'cause sets are sets, you get the answer 1.

I think that you're implying that somewhere along the design path,
someone might have suggested that the semantics of / should be such
that */.. returned a node sequence containing N of the current node,
where N is the number of element children of the current node.

But my guess is that any location path that's valid in XPath 1.0 will
always return a node sequence that doesn't contain duplicates, in
document order (and this guess was confirmed by Mike yesterday). Thus
*/.. will return a node sequence containing a single node, so you get
the answer 1, as you did in XPath 1.0.

I feel like I'm missing something.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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