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RE: Where is the benefit ? (Was : RE: [xsl] The hard cocktail of sequence and (node-)set ..)

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> Thanks for your thoughts, Jeni & Mike. I was also kind of curious why
> sequences are not allowed to contain other sequences?

I don't actually know the origins of that decision. It was there in the
XQuery data model before the two groups started working together, it almost
certainly comes from Quilt and no doubt has its origins in the academic work
that Quilt was based on. During the time the joint task force has been
working, it hasn't been seriously questioned.

One justification is that if you allow nested lists, you end up with a data
structure very similar to trees, but these are trees that don't translate at
all naturally to XML trees. There's always been an aim to keep the type
system aligned as far as possible with XML and XML Schema.

Mike Kay


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