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Subject: Re: [xdi] Reconsideration of dictionary syntax
I think the pipe character is the next character to consider for additional bracketing. However, since it doesn't distinguish left and right, we should use it for the most finite class of expressions that need to be enclosed in a bracket syntax. Would this be variable instead of definition? By the way, Ruby syntax uses the pipe character to delimit the argument variables when starting a method definition, while many languages use curly brackets to enclose definition bodies. I think it would be even better to eliminate the pervasive entity-attribute distinction marking and free up the angle brackets. No users have asked for this feature. Even in SQL, the one popular model that does support an entity-attribute distinction, it is declared positionally, not by requiring a special character at each reference. Constantly maintaining a mostly irrelevant distinction while writing addresses is going to confuse developers, as I think Animesh raised at the last meeting. The only use case is overloading an entity and an attribute definition with the same name at the same level, which would be even more confusing and better avoided. I'm sorry to raise this again, but I strongly feel we should get it right now as changing later is going to be much more difficult. If we do need entity-attribute distinction, we can declare it at the dictionary level, with no penalty other than having to throw an error on attempting attribute-only usage on an entity or vice versa, which is the same thing we'd do whenever a developer gets the angle bracket syntax wrong. Joseph On Nov 12, 2013, at 12:25 AM, Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org> wrote:
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