Precompiling Xpath expressions

A precompiled XPath expression -- if we supported it, and I don't think  we
do -- would be a ready-to-execute data structure which can be used to
evaluate an XPath. "Preparsed" might be a better description. The idea is
that if you're going to run the same XPath many times, it may be more
efficient to translate it into executable form once and use that
translation repeatedly, rather than always starting from the text-string
representation and having to retranslate it.

Xalan does support precompiled stylesheets -- that's a basic part of the
TrAX API's design.  But translating a stylesheet is much more work than
translating an individual expression.

Should Xalan support precompiled XPaths? Probably. I'll post an enhancement
request into Bugzilla.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman, IBM Next-Generation Web Technologies: XML, XSL and more.
"The world changed profoundly and unpredictably the day Tim Berners Lee
got bitten by a radioactive spider." -- Rafe Culpin, in r.m.filk


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