[xquery-talk] format-number()?

Michael Kay mike at saxonica.com
Sun Feb 12 22:53:58 PST 2012


On 13/02/2012 01:45, Birnbaum, David J wrote:
>> Dear XQuery List,
>>
>> Does anyone happen to know why XPath format-number() is not available
>> in XQuery? This is just a historical question, and not a request for
>> technical advice.
>>
>>
Historically XQuery was more interested in accessing the data in a 
database than in rendering it for human output - people liked the idea 
of keeping the data access (model) part separate from the user interface 
part (view) of the application, and XQuery was focused on the former. 
Moving the function from XSLT also wasn't trivial because of the 
dependency on the xsl:decimal format declaration, and until XSLT 2.0 
published a revised spec, because of the historic dependency of the 
original XSLT 1.0 function on the JDK 1.1 specification.

Michael Kay
Saxonica


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