Re: [Yaml-core] Implicits, resolution, and everything

[David H. <dav...@bl...>]

T. Onoma wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 September 2004 07:37 pm, Clark C. Evans wrote:
> 
>>On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 07:19:35PM -0400, T. Onoma wrote:
>>| If a "customer" loaded this:
>>|
>>|   ---
>>|   a: 1
>>|   b: 2
>>|   a: 3
>>|
>>| What would happen? According to the "YAML Model" an error would be
>>| be thrown saying "you got it wrong dumb dumb".
>>
>>Yep.  I'd expect every YAML Parser to do the same thing, in
>>fact, this exact item will have to be in the YAML Test Suite.
>>
>>| Anyhow, that' my suggestion concerning this. It makes things a lot less
>>| complex, gets rid of the warts, and is a very simple thing to offer.
>>
>>I'm not even going to humor a reconsideration of the
>>core model, sorry.
> 
> You act like I'm putting a match to the whole model! This is really a very 
> minor point, one new _recommended_ type and a small three sentence foot note 
> to the spec. Yet, you act like the whole thing would tumble apart if it were 
> allowed.

I agree with Clark here. The YAML data model is both theoretically elegant
and maps really well to practical programming languages. For any other data
model, it would also be possible to come up with examples that require a
little indirection in order to make the example fit.

> Unfortunately, you will have to continue to deal with the ambiguities created 
> when "resolution" fails due to TAG, or float vs. integer, or implicit tags, 
> etc. You will endlessly debate the question of equality, needlessly, and you 
> will continue to wonder "who John Doe really is".

There are similarly tricky issues whatever types are used as the basis: using
different types just moves the trickiness around -- for example from equality
to function application or to testing whether a relation is a function (I've
spent a long time thinking about this).

-- 
David Hopwood <dav...@bl...>