Chapter 4 Types

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

It seems to me that to have clear semantic requirements for expressions, 
operators and functions that we need to start with really clear 
definitions of types.

More as a note to myself that Chapter 4 needs to start with an 
introduction subsection. That is so it is possible to refer to the text 
that now immediately follows "4 Types" without appearing to refer to the 
entire chapter.

Second, I think a much shorter, say a paragraph at most, discussion of 
what lies within this chapter is more than sufficient. As written it 
defines (or appears to define) rules for values, references, etc. All of 
that can be done but needs to be done where appropriate. 

I think part of my uncertainty is that most of this has been defined 
before. The W3C Schema datatypes come to mind. 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/)

Or, ISO/IEC 11404:1996 
(http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG11/docs/iso11404.pdf)

(I am sure there are others, those just happen to be two that come to mind.)

Granted there may be some datatypes that are not defined elsewhere that 
we need but shouldn't we limit ourselves to defining only those?

Broader question: What impact would applying the datatypes as defined in 
ISO/IEC 11404:1996 have on the current function definitions? Are our 
current definitions far enough from those to cause problems?

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)