> The strange thing is why so 
> many people expect it to work. There are relatively few 
> languages where you can use a string containaing a bit of 
> language syntax and expect to use that as part of a language 
> expression. 

I think the reason is that path expressions look a bit like file names,
and variable references in XPath look a bit like the macros in some
shell script languages, so people imagine they are dealing with macros
rather than variables.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 


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