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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: limits of the generic
 Hi Jeff, > I think you've hit the nub of this issue. We expect '+' to be commutative, > associative, and have additive inverses. At least associativity and > additive inverses have been shown in the examples in this thread to have > been violated when dates and one or more durations are added. I *think* that it's still commutative, in that: $dateTime + $duration = $duration + $dateTime > We also expect consequences of these properties, such as > a + x = a + y => x = y > x < y => x + a < y + a > (where a is a duration and x and y are dates) to be true, and they > are not (the converse of the first one is true, however). The > algebra of DateTime x Duration with operation + is not the algebra > of a group or any other familiar structure, so many of our > expectations for the '+' operation will be violated. Typically this > is occuring because a thing that looks like a fixed duration, such > as P1M, is actually a different length in units of days or seconds > depending upon the context in which it is used in addition. Yes; I can't think of any examples where adding a dayTimeDuration to a date or dateTime would break the normal semantics of '+', unless you start taking leap-seconds into account (?!?) > As you say, however, it is useful to be able to add and subtract > dates and durations. If someone with a decent background in algebra > can spell it out formally, there may be some way for people to use > '+' and not have their intuition violated too often. There's also the intuition (logic) of the machine to worry about. I could imagine a clever XPath 2.0 processor seeing: a + x < a + y and thinking that it can just do: x < y in order to work out the answer. > Otherwise, (or perhaps even if there is a formal algebra, but it's > too exotic) treating the addition as a named function with arbitrary > but reasonable semantics, without all the assumptions about '+' that > we drag into every addition we see, may be the right way to proceed. Yep, agreed. As you pointed out above, it would still be OK to use '+' to add dayTimeDurations to dates or dateTimes, but not yearMonthDurations (or durations more generally). Cheers, Jeni --- Jeni Tennison http://www.jenitennison.com/ 
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