Usually this method can be treated as an ordinary equvalence relation, but actually it is not is not transitive. Here is a precise specification:
There are two categories of XML object: objects with a known instance type, and objects whose only known type is one of the ur-types (either AnyType or AnySimpleType). The first category is compared in terms of logical value spaces, and the second category is compared lexically.
Within each of these two categories, valueEquals is a well-behaved equivalence relation. However, when comparing an object of known type with an object with ur-type, the comparison is done by attempting to convert the lexical form of the ur-typed object into the other type, and then comparing the results. Ur-typed objects are therefore treated as lexical wildcards and may be equal to objects in different value spaces, even though the objects in different value spaces are not equal to each other.
For example, the anySimpleType value "1" will compare as an equalValue to the string "1", the float value "1.0", the double value "1.0", the decimal "1", and the GYear "1", even though all these objects will compare unequal to each other since they lie in different value spaces.
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