Most probably, any XPath engine has some *initialisation*
phase, which is performed once and forever. I think that a
not bad definition for the term "initialisation phase" would
be: "A set of actions to build the context for subsequent
stages of the system".
I'm probably thinking primarily of use cases where the XPath expressions are
written by someone different from the author of the application - for
example, where XPath expressions might occur in some data file to calculate
say the shipping cost of an order: the problem with current mechanisms is
that namespace bindings can be defined by the author of the application that
calls saxon:evaluate() or its Java equivalent, but not by the author of the
XPath expression.
It's true of course that such a data file might contain a number of XPath
expressions and you might want to define the namespace bindings that apply
to all of them. But I don't want to overcomplicate things. One of the
benefits of an interface like saxon:evaluate() is that it is stateless.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
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