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<h1>Changes to system programming interfaces</h1>
<p><i>"System programming" interfaces are those interfaces that might be used by advanced applications, perhaps
by code integrating Saxon within other products, but are unlikely to be used by typical user-written application code.
</i></p>
<p>The <a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/event/Receiver.html"><code>Receiver</code></a> interface (widely used internally within
Saxon) has changed to reduce the dependency on the <a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/om/NamePool.html"><code>NamePool</code></a>.
On the <code>startElement()</code> and <code>attribute()</code> calls, the names and types of elements and attributes are now
passed as object references rather than integer codes. Similarly on the <code>namespace()</code> call, the
integer namespace code is replaced with a reference to a <code>NamespaceBinding</code> object.</p>
<p>Integer namespace codes allocated from the name pool are no longer used. They have been replaced with
the <a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/om/NamespaceBinding.html"><code>NamespaceBinding</code></a>
object which contains the prefix and URI as strings. The purpose of this change is
to reduce the number of synchronized calls on the <a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/om/NamePool.html"><code>NamePool</code></a>,
and hence to reduce contention; the performance
benefit from avoiding string comparisons did not justify the overhead caused by synchronization. This change
results in small changes to both the <a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/om/NodeInfo.html"><code>NodeInfo</code></a> and
<a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/event/Receiver.html"><code>Receiver</code></a>
interfaces.</p>
<p>A new method <code>getSchemaType()</code> is added to the <a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/om/NodeInfo.html"><code>NodeInfo</code></a>
interface, returning the type annotation as a <a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/type/SchemaType.html"><code>SchemaType</code></a>
object. The existing <code>getTypeAnnotation()</code> method which returns the same information as an integer fingerprint
remains available for the time being.</p>
<p>The mechanism for injecting trace calls into expressions has been generalised so that an arbitrary
<a class="bodylink"
href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/expr/parser/CodeInjector.html"><code>CodeInjector</code></a> can
be supplied. This can be selective about what kind of expression it inserts into the parse tree, and where. This
gives a lot more flexibility for tools that add debugging or performance monitoring capabilities to the product.
For XQuery this can be controlled at the level of the <a class="bodylink"
href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/query/StaticQueryContext.html"><code>StaticQueryContext</code></a>, for XSLT using the
<a class="bodylink" href="../../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/trans/CompilerInfo.html"><code>CompilerInfo</code></a> object.</p>
<p>In the expression tree, the representation of path expressions and axis expressions has changed. The class
<code>PathExpression</code> has disappeared; instead, the class <code>SlashExpression</code>
is used, wrapped in a <code>DocumentSorter</code> if sorting into document order and elimination
of duplicates is required. A subclass of <code>SlashExpression</code>, the <code>SimpleSlashExpression</code>,
is used for expressions of the form <code>$p/title</code> where the left-hand side selects a singleton and the
right-hand side is an axis expression; this optimization reduces the number of context objects that need
to be created, especially in XQuery where such constructs are very common.</p>
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