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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XQuery types was Re: Yet another plea for XUpdat
 > At 12:07 PM 5/5/2002 -0600, Uche Ogbuji wrote: > >Anyway, back to the main point. I agree with your broader definition of > >types as being defined by constraints, and this is *precisely* why I am > >always ridiculing the W3C efforts which put so much effort into static > >typing at the behest of their SQL and procedural programming backgrounds > >(I guess). Programmers don't need to become pure mathematicians to > >appreciate this: Bertrand Meyer provides much of the essence in his own > >writing about object-oriented development. > > I don't really understand you here, Uche. Of course you don't. Because I assumed we were talking about utility for XML, not general purpose programming, I ommitted the 25 pages it requires to discuss the philosophy behind first-class dynamic typing without ambiguity. *sigh* > Bertrand Meyer certainly felt that static typing was a central feature of > Eiffel, the language he designed. Static typing was there, for the same reason that static typing emerged in compilers in the first place: to take advantage of physical layer facilities provided by the hardware. I am not arguing this reality, and never have. My problem with static typing starts when it becomes the basis of user data typing in languages. For instance, the C++ and Java wedding of static types to classes, causing painful distortion to both. When it comes to user modularization, Meyer favors general-purpose constraints, which is why he built *these* into Eiffel. Static typing is a necessary evil for systems at that lower level: for performance reasons. Being that XML is at a higher level of processing, it should not have to be bound to this evil. At least not explicitly. > If you think Bertrand Meyer is on the right track, saying that both dynamic > typing and static typing are important, then why do you think that this > does not apply to XQuery? Because Meyer was constructing a compiler: he had to deal directly with the physical layer. I think one of the strengths of XML is that technologies at the XML layer should not have to. This was also one of the promises of relational DBMS, which I think got besmirched in the ascendancy of SQL. -- Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc. http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com Track chair, XML/Web Services One (San Jose, Boston): http://www.xmlconference.com/ DAML Reference - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/05/01/damlref.html RDF Query using Versa - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think10/index.html XML, The Model Driven Architecture, and RDF @ XML Europe - http://www.xmleurope.com/2002/kttrack.asp#themodel 
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