From: Durant Schoon (durant@ilm.com)
Date: Tue Jul 17 2001 - 17:30:34 MDT
> From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
>
> Well, back when I was first writing my design notes on Flare, there were
> no XML Schema. I need to investigate XML Schema in more detail, but my
> preliminary investigations seem to show that they don't match the natural
> idioms for Flare modules and Flare planes. It looks to me like XML Schema
> are based around the idea that every <xyz:arms> tag means the same thing
> everywhere in the document. In Flare, <arms> means "appendage" in the
> <human> class and <arms> means "ammunition" in the <quakegunner> class,
> which is the way that almost every object-oriented language works it.
I don't know if this should be taken to an sl4-flare, list, but...
If Sally is a human and a quakegunner (or a groud soldier),
wouldn't you want something like this (being extra verbose):
<human:sally>
<appendage:arms>
<quantity:number> 2 </quantity:number>
</appendage:arms>
<quakegunner:arms>
<weapon:bfg>
<quantity:number> 1 </quantity:number>
</weapon:bfg>
</quakegunner:arms>
</human:sally>
You can still collect all the "arms" and sort them out later or
treat them all as "arms".
Also Schema have nice notions for limiting, say, how many of something
you want (an octopus can have 0 to 8 tentacles). You can also say
Sally has two hands. One is of type lefthand the other is of type
righthand. Kind of like invariants if and when you want them for
Flare's programming-by-contract.
(ok, maybe this is getting way too detailed and these things should
be decided later).
-- Durant Schoon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:36 MDT