RE: [xsl] RE: Designs for XSLT functions

["Michael Kay" <mhkay at iclway dot co dot uk>]

> An apply() function (which simply calls another function whose
> name is decided at runtime) would be easier to use than a
> general-purpose evaluate() routine though.  Programmatically constructing
a
> syntactically valid XPath expression can be tricky.
>
> Apply() would likely also be easier to implement and more efficient
> than evaluate().

Ease of use? Programmers using ODBC or JDBC are very used to constructing
SQL statements at run-time, and rarely complain.

Ease of implementation? It's easier to implement one construct than two, and
if one is a subset of the functionality of the other, I'd rather implement
the more general one.

Efficiency? Show me the evidence! It's easy to use the same kind of tricks
as one uses for format-number(), caching the format patterns that have been
used in the past so they don't have to be parsed again.

Mike Kay


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