Fwd: things about grouping

Ihe,

(To the list: I'm apparently having trouble with Gmail's new
"features" so please forgive any noisy resends you may see.)

You wrote:

> well you are no longer dealing in sets ...... so if you apply a
> set-theoretic construct then all bets are off and the law of the
> jungle applies.

Substitute "English-language semantics" in for "a set-theoretic
construct" above, and you have a reasonable explanation, I think, for
the "except" business.

Personally I have a little imp in my head that does a bit of
rewriting, so when I see

* except head

I read "child::* except child::head"

and when I see "current-group() except head" I see "current-group()
except child::head". This helps remind me of the context of the
right-hand side of "except".

I have lots of these rewriting homunculi at my service, although they
are sometimes lazy. So I wake them up when I go into debugging mode.

True, the art of language design is in part making it possible to do
without many of these guys, as they have a way of getting in each
other's way.

But notice in this instance, the imp has not written the "except" but
its operands. In other words, it is simply resolving the abbreviations
in XPath.

Cheers,
Wendell

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