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RE: bohemians, gentry

• To: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>,"XML DEV" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: bohemians, gentry
• From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
• Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 22:23:45 -0800
• Thread-index: AcKcIzdUynIqQkURQwKJylWr+K85PwAANZ5w
• Thread-topic: bohemians, gentry

Your entire argument is incorrect. A decimal type can hold and represent
1.1 with ease. A floating point type cannot accurately represent 1.1. 


-- 
PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM 
Let sleeping dogs lie, unless they snore.                    

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights. 

>  
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:ricko@a...] 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 9:58 PM
> To: XML DEV
> 
> From: "Jonathan Robie" <jonathan.robie@d...>
> 
> > My question was:
> > 
> > "Why does the presence of a data type prevent reuse, since you can 
> > always throw it away? Can you show me an example where this 
> causes problems?"
> > 
> > The data type provides additional information about the 
> data. You can 
> > feel free to discard this information if you don't need it, 
> or to use 
> > it to reinterpret the data, or to use the data as is. I am 
> trying to 
> > think of a concrete example where the presence of this data 
> really gets in the way.
> 
> My perspective is slightly different than Jonathan's or 
> Uche's nominal positions.
> 
> The concrete example is the one currently under discussion in 
> various places: that in XML Schemas datatypes you cannot 
> represent any exact amounts that have decimal positions.  So 
> the decimal "1.1" is not the exact number 1.1. This will be 
> well-known to most people who have done undergraduate 
> computer science, and for a catch up, see Sun's BigDecimal 
> documentation.
> 
> As soon as I fix the datatype xs:decimal to the type "1.1" I 
> am fixing its value and precision to something different than 
> almost any "average"
> user will be expecting.  And whether I can "throw away" that 
> typing (i.e., adopt the natural typing that conforms to 
> "average" user's expectation) depends entirely on  the 
> particular situation, it seems to me. (There is no need to 
> adopt either extreme, unfortunately, that datatyping can 
> always be thrown away or that datatyping can never be thrown away.)
> 
> Jonathan's escape clause is to say "well, xs:decimal is not 
> really the correct datatype" but what else is there?  A 
> restricted version of String will result in these numbers 
> being unusable as numbers in standard query languages.
> 
> Sorry to be a broken record, but WXS' pretence at being a 
> universal schema language (rather than adopting a modular, 
> extensible design) and its adoption by other technologies 
> means that we have to judge it far more crtitically than less 
> grand systems.
> 
> Cheers
> Rick Jelliffe
> 
> P.S. For a possible alternative set of datatypes, you may be 
> amused by http://www.topologi.com/public/alternateDatatypes.html
> 
> 
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