> The definition of nodeset equality, inequality, and 
> relational operations in XPath seems more than a little unusual to me.

You are right, but we have to live with it.

I think they went out of their way to avoid introducing existential
quantifiers and range variables ("there exists x in X such that", etc),
presumably with the aim of keeping simple things simple. I have seen many
other query languages attempt to do this and it always leads to some
expressions having counter-intuitive semantics. I remember a debate about
whether SQL should do this and fortunately it was thrown out on these
grounds.

Mike Kay


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