From a user's perspective, how is it helpful to make a
distinction between processing order and result order?

It is always helpful to know the truth in advance than to discover it
by accident.

 If we, as users,
can't use the word "process" (because it's reserved for implementation
details) then what word do we use?




The word "process" can surely be used -- Where did I hint it couldn't?



We can say that" the nodes selected by the expression as specified the select
attribute are *processed" not in any predefined order -- in
indeterministic way" ... or "asynchronously", if the latter is more
understandable. Both of these definitions of processing mean that
there is no specified order.

A very good real-world analogy was made by Wendell Piez and you also
got two excellent replies from Dr. Kay and David Carlisle, to which it
would be difficult to add something significant.





--
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
---------------------------------------
Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
---------------------------------------
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk
-------------------------------------
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what
you're doing is work or play






On 11/2/06, Evan Lenz <evan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dimitre Novatchev wrote:
> The order in which an <xsl:apply-templates> instruction is applied on
> the nodes selected by the expression as specified in its select
> attribute is not defined and may be in any order.
Surely it's misleading to say that the processing order is "not
defined". From a user's perspective, how is it helpful to make a
distinction between processing order and result order? If we, as users,
can't use the word "process" (because it's reserved for implementation
details) then what word do we use?

I haven't implemented an XSLT processor, but when is this distinction
even useful, in practice?

I could say that it's undefined what order the XSLT processor processes
the nodes in and whether or not it first translates them to Swahili and
back. The important thing is that the result is "as if" it was processed
in document order (and not translated to another human language)... Is
there something about processing nodes in document order that seems so
inefficient that we have to go out of our way to make this distinction?

Evan