Re: [xml] XPath numbers and exponential notation

[Bjorn Reese <breese mail1 stofanet dk>]

Daniel Veillard wrote:

>   But it really depends on how other implementations did. I would prefer
> a clean way but if others processors have extended the number production,
> then we should accept their input. But we should not incitate people to
> write stylesheet which are not proper per the standard.

I think this discussion is missing the important point. The XPath 1.0
standard is inadequate (and I regard the XPath 2.0 requirement to support
scientific notation as an acknowledgement of this) because it allows
garbage in the results. I do not expect any consistant behaviour from
other implemenations because of this.

Standard compliancy is definitely a good thing, but we should also keep
in mind that the W3C standards are created much faster than other standards
and thus more error-prone (the XSLT standard is another example of where
number formatting is inadequately described).

If people want a strictly XPath 1.0 conforming behaviour which allow
garbage in the results, I have no objections (you have to modify
xmlXPathStringEvalNumber, xmlXPathCompNumber, and xmlXPathFormatNumber
in order to do so), but I am perfectly happy with the current solution,
so I don't plan to make any such modifications myself.