forwarding for Mike....
Mike Taylor wrote:
> (Ray -- please forward to the list. I'm ill at home, and can't post
> to ZNG from this account. Thanks.)
>
> > Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 14:30:23 -0500
> > From: Ray Denenberg <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> > > I sent this message last Friday, and didn't get a delivery failure
> > > message or anything similar; but there has been absolutely zero
> > > response on-list, which makes me wonder whether it mysteriously
> > > didn't get through.
> >
> > It never made it to the list.
>
> My stupid mistake. Closer examination of my outgoing mail log shows
> that I sent it to <[log in to unmask]> :-! D'oh!
>
> > > I propose that we change the order to:
> > > relation/distance/unit/ordering
> >
> > I'll wait till someone seconds that
>
> C'mon, then, someone! Adam? Ralph? Poul-Henrik? You know it makes
> sense :-) [Also, if this change is NOT going to happen, I'd like to
> know the worst ASAP, so my parser can be declared stable.]
>
> > (actually I'd prefer to change it to the order Rob suggests, Unit
> > Distance Relation Ordering).
>
> Ah, but Rob was claiming that this is the _current_ ordering. Which
> rather proveds my point that no-one can remember what the current
> ordering is. I think memorability is much more important that
> conciseness, especially since defaulted parameters can be omitted.
>
> > > 3b. The things that the grammar called "index-name", we have been
> > > calling "qualifiers" (and talking about the "qualifier-sets"
> > > that contain them.) I think that's a much nicer name than
> > > "index-name", in part because it doesn't carry such a loading
> > > of implementation detail. Also, remember that we way we've
> > > designed things, a qualifier will typically implemented by
> > > multiple indexes (a word index and a string index) so I don't
> > > want to give misleading impressions.
> >
> > I think you should cover this in the tutorial.
>
> :-)
>
> > We're really talking about "logical indexes" (which may be multiple
> > real indexes) but we leave out "logical" because we're lazy.
>
> Well, it's kind of the tutorial that motivated me to propose this
> change. When I'd finished writing it, I went through to see what I'd
> said about indexes, and found that the _only_ mention, in a document
> oriented towards Real World users, was this sentence:
>
> Qualifiers indicate what part of the records is to be searched
> - in implementation terms, they frequently specify which index
> is to be inspected in the database.
>
> So since it appeared that it was natural to discuss the language
> itself in terms of the abstract things called "qualifiers", it made
> sense to me that the formal grammar should call them by the same name.
> (I'm also pretty sure that this usage goes right back to Ralph's first
> back-of-an-envelope grammar.)
>
> > Ok, I got rid of order-or-equal-relation though in a somewhat
> > different way than you suggest. I continue to want to avoid lumping
> > = with the numerics.
> > So we have:
> >
> > base-relation ::= order-relation| "=" |"exact"|"all" |"any"|"scr"
> > order-relation::= "<"|">"|"<="|">="|"<>"
> > prox-relation ::= order-relation|"="
> >
> > Might not be exactly how you'd like it but a reasonable compromise?
>
> I think this is pretty nice.
>
> _/|_ _______________________________________________________________
> /o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> www.miketaylor.org.uk
> )_v__/\ "What can you say about a society that says God is dead and
> Elvis is alive?" -- Irv Kupcinet.
|