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Jeff.Lowery@creo.com (Jeff Lowery) writes:
>Perhaps some would find it useful to go one step farther, and
>associate data with internal storage meta-representations (okay, I
>made that up). I bet someone is doing this somewhere, with proper use
>of terminology, even.
>
>Hashmaps, arrays, red-black trees, dictionaries, etc. all operate on
>pretty much the same principles (at least in the OO languages)
>regardless of the actual language they're implemented in.
Most of the time I just care about whether order is important or not,
but you're right that there's some useful metadata that isn't exactly
captured in existing approaches. For a really simple case, I can look
at para+ and know that it's one or more para elements, but it doesn't
tell me if their sequence is actually important or not.
>Providing storage 'hints' to an application may seem like a step
>beyond datatyping, but I think it's less intrusive. More of a
>suggestion than an imperative. Combined with meta-object protocols
>[1], annotating an XML document (or better yet, its schema) with this
>type of information could improve productivity in some cases.
It might conceivably be easier to get this right than to sort out the
many issues around type definition in current systems. Definitely worth
investigation, I'd say.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org
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