On 3/31/07, Florent Georges <darkman_spam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dimitre Novatchev wrote:



 Hi Dimitre



> What I would like added is the ability to define global bindings
> (define once, use always thereafter).

 In this case, you'll have to define precisely what means "global",
how glabally the bindings will be.  And IMHO it will be complex, while
not impossible, to do that in a general way.

 Should the binding be global in the whole application (what is an
application BTW)?  Should the binding be global in a module, related to
some documents (the documents we are evaluating expressions against),
or in some other way I didn't think about?




I have always associated locality with nesting.



As for where/when to specify special, non-on-the-fly-bindings, we
shouldn't forget that an XPath expression comes always embedded in
something else -- that is, it is already "local" to some outer scope
and anything defined in outer scopes will be "global" to the XPath
expression.

Most probably, any XPath engine has some *initialisation* phase, which
is performed once and forever. I think that a not bad definition for
the term "initialisation phase" would be: "A set of actions to build
the context for subsequent stages of the system".


--
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
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Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
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