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Created attachment 1522 [details] List of changes proposed Most uses of the words "identity" and "identical" in our specs make sense to readers who approach them from the ordinary English meanings of the words; a few uses rely on a specialized usage of the terms which some WG members have reported is common in discussions of object-oriented programming. Those passages make very little sense to readers who endeavor to understand them using the ordinary tools for establishing the meaning of words in a text, like dictionaries. I propose that we reword some sections of our specifications to avoid relying on domain-specific meanings for terms not defined in our specifications. I am opening this bug against XDM, but in fact the passages I believe we should change appear also in Functions and Operators, XQuery, XSLT, and XQuery Requirements and use cases; some passages in XPath might also be rephrased but I don't think they are urgent. Attached is a list of passages I believe should change and proposed wording for each of them.
Created attachment 1523 [details] Definitions of 'identity' and related terms from several desk dictionaries The changes proposed rely on some claims about ordinary English usage of the terms 'identity', 'identical', etc.; this attachment supplies some documentation of those claims in the form of definitions found in an unsystematic survey of dictionaries.
Created attachment 1527 [details] Revised list of change proposals This revised list of changes adds alternate wordings to a few of the change proposals included. The original proposals are unchanged. Since there is no text in attachment 1522 [details] that is not repeated here, I'm marking the original attachment as obsolete.
Another alternative for XQuery and XPath Data Model 3.1: 2.3 Node Identity Each node has a unique identity. The identity of a node is distinct from its value or other visible properties; nodes may be distinguished from other nodes even when they have the same values for all intrinsic properties other than their identity. (Atomic values do not have identity; The identity of atomic values, by contrast, is determined solely by their intrinsic properties. No two distinct integers, for example, have the same value; every instance of the value “5” as an integer is identical to every other instance of the value “5” as an integer.)
At the joint meeting today, the WGs discussed the changes proposed in the attachment. Some amendments were made to some of the proposals (as recorded in the minutes of the meeting) and all changes were adopted either as proposed or as amended. The list of optional changes and miscellaneous comments was recommended to the editors for their consideration; changes were left to the editors' discretion. Accordingly, I'm marking this bug as RESOLVED / FIXED.