RE: XSLT 2.0 Decimal number silliness

# 
# Explain a little more, if you can.  Certainly they're not 
# opposed to interoperability in principle.  And, presumably, 
# the minimal legal implementation of 18 digits total isn't 
# good enough for their purposes.  What is it the XQuery folks 
# need that a fixed length or specified decimal length wouldn't 
# solve? It would be really nice to find a clean solution that 
# meets everyones needs.

I'm reluctant to try and put forward someone else's arguments. But the
argument in favour of leaving arithmetic implementation-defined seems
usually to be based either (a) on the need to implement it efficiently in an
environment such as the .NET CLR, or (b) on the need to map XPath operators
and types directly to SQL operators and types.

Michael Kay