I'm not sure how to best express this in the design doc, but please feel to add this as appropriate: One yardstick that I think is rather relevant here is what happens when the value we're selecting on is not a string, but e.g. a number.

Put another way, substituting each of the options for :xxx, which pattern gets selected here, and what would a reader expect based on the function name?

.local $num = {1 :number}
.match {$local :xxx}
1.0 {{Very one}}
1   {{Integral one}}
one {{Category one}}
*   {{Not one}}

With :select, :exact and :equals, no hint is given that anything like a type cast might be happening here, so a reader could very easily presume that the comparison is numeric, and that therefore Very one would get selected, as it's before the Integral one.

My preference here would be for :string, which more clearly communicates that its input value is stringified and then compared, and that the Integral one pattern is therefore selected.

In the 2023-12-11 teleconference we decided to use :string. I have updated this PR to reflect that choice.

@eemeli I fixed the text, so check it again? You were right that we lost the normative text about annotations--and I wrote this not thinking of that.

In the 2023-12-18 call there was a consensus to merge this as "proposed" for further consideration in the 2024-01-08 call. If you have additional proposals, please make a new PR.