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RE: Names As Types

• To: 'Vladimir Gapeyev' <vgapeyev@s...>
• Subject: RE: Names As Types
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:23:41 -0500
• Cc: 'Rick Jelliffe' <rjelliffe@a...>, XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>

No, that's an acceptable stack, Vladimir.  

What say other turtles?

I know some of you prefer a turtleZero, but we 
can punt that away safely until we get to running 
turtles and rough dancing.

len


From: Vladimir Gapeyev [mailto:vgapeyev@s...]

Doesn't the following stack fit the bill?:

Top:     7. Humans

          6. Applications

          5. High-level programming languages

          4. Declarative invariants

          3. Types (i.e., structural constraints)

          2. Abstract syntax  [XML Infoset, or other XML data models]

Bottom:  1. Concrete syntax  [XML]


This is just an XML-specific instance of the stack common to software in 
general.  The stack became more refined over the decades: originally all 
semantics was in assembly-coded applications (#6), but gradually the 
layers #2-#5 have separated.

Unfortunately, XML practice doesn't align along this stack cleanly.  (I'd 
say, this is too bad for practice ;-) E.g., W3C Schema spreads across 
several layers, tightly glueing them together: it hijacks #2 by putting 
PSVI instead of the Infoset, it's bulk (rightly so) is #3, but it also has 
things belonging to #4 (e.g. key/keyref constraints) and even #5 or #6 
(e.g. the mechanism for filling-in default values and the mechanism for 
translating XML into PSVI).

Or you were asking about something totally different?  If you have stuff 
like RDF in mind, it is an application that uses XML as just a substrate 
on which it grows.  (I.e., RDF has a similar stack, and if we care only 
about XML-based RDF, the interesting part of this stack is inside #5 and 
#6 above.)  But RDF, or similar "semantic web" developments, can't be the 
only way to give XML semantics!  (Sorry if the RDF guess was wrong)

VG

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