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At 03:49 PM 5/6/2002 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>On Mon, 2002-05-06 at 14:57, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> > Because I assumed we were talking about utility for XML, not general
> > purpose programming, I ommitted the 25 pages it requires to discuss
> > the philosophy behind first-class dynamic typing without ambiguity.
>
>This discussion's gotten me thinking once again about whether XML is
>appropriate to the tasks for which it is being sold. There was a long
>discussion about types here a few years ago in which someone suggested
>that the types provided by DTDs were in fact far too rich, and that
>perhaps CDATA/ID/IDREF was already more than enough. Then we get into
>W3C XML Schema types, which I consider far too overgrown, and now XQuery
>is in the type mire.
Frankly, I think much of this is because of the level of the discussion.
Suppose you try to multiply an integer times a URI. Do you want that error
to be caught? Suppose you want a sorted list of numbers - do you want to
sort them numerically rather than lexically? If so, types are good. Yes,
whoever implemented the system had to think to make that happen. We have
descriptions of the thinking implementors will have to do.
Has the strong static typing of Java gotten in your way as a programmer?
Jonathan
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