"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> Once you have that much metadata about "quantity" you can do an awful
> lot of things you couldn't do when "quantity" was a textual type
> identifer applied to text. You can optimize the representation of that
> integer - which is what I've proposed - and you skip an awful lot of
> intermediate processing to reach that number.
>
> If all you really want is the number, why monkey around with text?
Portability. It's the number one reason to use XML, made relevant by
XML's ability to represent a huge variety of information.
-- Ron
