[exslt] Extension candidates

[Dimitre Novatchev]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 8:37 AM, John Snelson <john.snelson at oracle.com> wrote:

>> Therefore, having a reference forever does not mean having the
>> referenced object alive forever -- no major problem here.
>
> That's not really true. The fact that nothing changes is an illusion that
> the language environment plays on the program by carefully managing it's
> access to the outside world (disk, network, etc.). It's entirely possible
> that an XML file on disk could change during the time a program is running.

We have to draw the line somewhere: There could be an earthquake in SF
or an ice storm in NE, or even a meteorite could collide with the
Earth...

I think it is quite off-topic here to speak even about transactions.

It is totally up to an XSLT processor or its optimizer whether to keep
something in memory, or to discard it and reassemble it later on
as-needed basis. AFAIK, this is already the case with existing
language processors. Therefore, to think of a "reference" only as a
memory address is a very narrow approach that misses important cases
of "reference".

Dimitre