XOM API for Processing XML with Java

["Michael Kay" <mike AT saxonica.com>]

> For example, changing 
> the NamePool from a fixed hash table to a form of dynamically 
> resizable hash table (or having it overflow into a dynamic 
> table for the pathologic case) may or may not fall into that 
> category, I don't know.

The basic design assumption behind Saxon's NamePool (sorry this has gone
rather off-topic) is that it's possible to encode the expanded name of a
node (URI plus local part) as a 32 bit integer, and a bonus is that there
are enough bits left over to represent the prefix as well. I've been
pleasantly surprised how well this has proved to handle some pretty
pathological cases, like the 15000-strong XQuery test suite. If I had one
user a month hitting the limit, then I'd raise it to 64 bits; but if it's
one user every five years, then I won't. (It is possible to partition the
workload to use multiple NamePools, but even that is something that I think
very few users have ever done.)

Michael Kay