RE: atoms, molecules

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Steve Rosenberry wrote:

>
> If I understand what Simon wishes to do, it is similar to what I wished
> for in a late March post to this list and also in comments I made to W3C
> requesting a regular expression syntax that allowed datatypes to be
> defined as regular expression atoms.  The start of the thread can be
> found at:
>
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2001JanMar/0425.
html

This message does seem relevent to the thread at hand.

The ability to define datatypes on the basis of regular expressions is
(IMHO) the single most powerful and unique feature of XML Schema datatypes.
My complaint, as XML _is_ based on unicode, is that the value space is not
itself derived from the lexical space, though this is perhaps more of a
philosophical rather than practical complaint. Yet a practical consequence
of requiring a regular expression pattern at the root of all simple
datatypes would be this very feature that a piece of software *would* be
able to bind a value to a regular expression and hence extract 'atoms' from
the molecule. Otherwise the concept of a "short integer" is so 1980s.

-Jonathan