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Re: typing and markup (was Re: XQuery types)

• To: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
• Subject: Re: typing and markup (was Re: XQuery types)
• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Mon, 06 May 2002 13:52:41 -0600
• Cc: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: Message from Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...> of "Mon, 06 May 2002 12:49:36 PDT." <5.1.0.14.0.20020506124501.0271cb50@n...>
• Sender: uche.ogbuji@f...

> At 03:49 PM 5/6/2002 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> >On Mon, 2002-05-06 at 14:57, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> >This discussion's gotten me thinking once again about whether XML is
> >appropriate to the tasks for which it is being sold. There was a long
> >discussion about types here a few years ago in which someone suggested
> >that the types provided by DTDs were in fact far too rich, and that
> >perhaps CDATA/ID/IDREF was already more than enough.  Then we get into
> >W3C XML Schema types, which I consider far too overgrown, and now XQuery
> >is in the type mire.
> 
> Frankly, I think much of this is because of the level of the discussion.
> 
> Suppose you try to multiply an integer times a URI. Do you want that error 
> to be caught? Suppose you want a sorted list of numbers - do you want to 
> sort them numerically rather than lexically? If so, types are good.

No one in this thread is saying that types are not good, note that the examples you give above are hardly peculiar to static types.


> Yes, 
> whoever implemented the system had to think to make that happen. We have 
> descriptions of the thinking implementors will have to do.
> 
> Has the strong static typing of Java gotten in your way as a programmer?

I know I'm just asking for trouble speaking throwing language flames, but yes.  Compared to programming in C or Python, programming in C++ or Java is like programming in a straitjacket.  Strong static typing (SST) is a big part of this, and not SST qua SST, but rather the fact that SST is tied so fundamentally to the facilities for user extension and generic programming.

There's good reason why people who give Python a good hard look (and get past the issue of significant whitespace) don't often turn back to Java.


-- 
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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