Re: [xml-dev] Re: [ANN] XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0 were published on 16Nov 1

[Marcus Reichardt <u123724@gmail.com>]

Can't really answer your question. Maybe David can as he knows a thing
or two about math notations ;)

On 11/17/19, Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de> wrote:
>  Interesting, Marcus, but I have a question: is there a predecessor based on
> a pure and fully composeable expression language so that (a) navigation is
> an expression from that language, (b) any expression of the language can be
> used as a predicate? Note that any increase of the language's expressiveness
> (e.g. adding new expressions, extending existing expressions) becomes an
> increase of navigational expressiveness.
>
> (The image that always comes to my mind is water embedded in water, water
> within and without, separated only by the transparent skin of path
> expression syntax - but that may be idiosyncratic.)
>
>     Am Sonntag, 17. November 2019, 10:20:26 MEZ hat Marcus Reichardt
> <u123724@gmail.com> Folgendes geschrieben:
>
>  Well, idioyncracies of XPath such as namespaces and filter predicates left
> aside, the idea of XPath starts from encoding documents into graphs of axis
> relations and then answering variable-free conjunctive path queries over
> those graphs, and as such is at least as old as terminological reasoning and
> description logic (no later than 1990), but arguably only slightly younger
> than Prolog/Datalog (1972) and at least as old as eg. monadic second-order
> logic (1975 or older).
> As applied to document engineering, I haven't been around long enough to
> have an opinion, but I can say that HyTime (1992, 1997) encoded path steps
> in location ladders (in markup/markup declarations) rather than compact
> expressions, probably to avoid ad-hoc syntax. Modern TEI uses XPointer (and
> hence also XPath), but TEI predates XML and I have no idea how TEI was like
> in the 1990s.
> Marcus Reichardtsgmljs.net
>
> Am 17.11.2019 um 02:17 schrieb Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de>:
>
>
>
>  Thank you, Marcus, Henry, Michael! But the idea of XPath appears to me so
> coherent that I find it difficult to believe that it emerged in a process
> which has to do with votings and can be captured by minutes. I would really
> like to get closer to the core of it.
> Hans-Jürgen
>
> John Steinbeck, East of Eden:"Nothing was ever created by two men. There are
> no good collaborations, whether in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in
> philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can
> build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness
> lies in the lonely mind of a man."
>
>     Am Sonntag, 17. November 2019, 01:18:30 MEZ hat Michael Kay
> <mike@saxonica.com> Folgendes geschrieben:
>
>
>
> Others with better memories can probably give more details, and there
> should be minutes somewhere once someone can come up with
> precise dates...
>
>
> I based the historical information in my book on minutes of meetings, and
> Sharon always used to tell me I got it all wrong. Presumably because the
> minutes were not (in her perception) an accurate account of what really
> happened in the corridors.
> I'm reminded of a nice remark in Martin Campbell-Kelly's excellent corporate
> history of ICL, that much of the information came from board minutes, and
> therefore at best, it didn't reflect what was actually going on in the
> company, but rather, what the board of directors thought was going on.
> Michael KaySaxonica
>