I've been taking a look at this bug and am trying to figure out what the correct behavior for this situation would be. Currently, attempting to call dfdlx:lookAhead as part of an expression for the default value of a newVariableInstance will result in a UsageError being thrown when attempting to get the bitOrder, as the VariableRuntimeData is descended from NonTermRuntimeData.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to want to use lookAhead from inside a newVariableInstance, but I'm not sure there is an easy way to get the parent sequence/element that contains the annotation where the newVariableInstance is defined. I noticed that for elements when the expression for byteOrder isn't defined, it just defaults to BigEndian with comments stating that this likely means that the element is likely hexBinary, in which case the byte order should be ignored. I don't know if it makes sense to do something like this and just defauilt bitOrder for VariableRuntimeData's to MSBF, as from the examples of lookAhead that I've seen involve looking into a hexBinary element. Thoughts? Josh
