RE: Sorting distinct values

> Somehow I was afraid that was the answer -- it gave off the 
> whiff of an issue that was hotly discussed in committee until 
> the day came when a decision had to be made, one way or the other.


Actually, it's not one of those issues that we had lots of fights over.
Rather, the reason there's no sort() in XPath is, by and large, that no-one
made any serious attempt to persuade the WG that there should be one. Don't
ask me why. Perhaps those who thought it desirable thought that not having a
sort capability at all was a lesser evil than having XQuery's sort
capability, which is what we would have ended up with.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/