> I understand the hesitation to increase the burden of 
> implementation, especially for open-source implementation 
> providers. 

It's not open-source implementors who push for this. They can implement a
new function in an afternoon. It's the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle,
for whom it takes a month.

And it has to be said that the amount of WG time is also significant. I
would estimate we spent about 500 hours of meeting time, either face-to-face
or in telcons, discussing the 2.0 function library. That's probably 5 hours
per function. There was therefore a high resistance to adding new "nice to
have" functions.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/