[xquery-talk] How much laziness is permitted?

[Pavel Minaev]

Re-reading the XQuery spec again, I'm trying to understand the full
implications of section 2.3.4 "Errors and Optimization". If I
understand it correctly, it at least allows implementation to be fully
lazy with respect to sequence, in that they can be implemented as lazy
non-cached sequence generators - i.e. akin to Microsoft's LINQ
"deferred evaluation", where you can chain and nest query expressions
as much as you like, but the whole thing will only start evaluating
when you actually try to use the resulting sequence (and only to the
extent that you use it), and any errors are similarly only reported at
that latter point. However, I would like to confirm that I am indeed
correct there.

Another related question is on how this interacts with try-catch in
XQuery 1.1. I've read the corresponding note in the draft in section
3.12, but I'm not sure I fully understand what it means. Consider this
code:

  (* module 1 *)
  declare function m1:gen() {
      for $x in 1 to 10000 return if ($x lt 10000) then $x else error()
  }

  (* module 2 *)
  declare function m2:trygen() {
    try { m1:gen() } catch * { () }
  };

  (* query *)
  m2:trygen()[1],

  let $xs := m2:trygen()
  for $x in $xs return $x * $x


Now if the full laziness is still allowed, a legitimate implementation
can either return 1 when lazy, or () when not. However, I can't wrap
my head about the second expression. If gen() is implemented lazily
and returns a generator, then the error will only be triggered on the
next line while running it. On the other hand, the spec seems to
require that the error should be caught by the catch block in
trygen(), since syntactically it appears in gen() when called by
trygen(). But how can trygen() do this without either doing eager
evaluation, or relying on some form of re-invokable continuations (to
backtrack to the proper point of error on exception, and return the
correct result?

I am particularly interested in how to handle this in presence of true
separate compilation for modules (i.e. when compiling trygen(), we
don't know how it will be used, and when compiling the query, we don't
know that trygen() has a try-catch expression inside).