>>> So I don't like this hijacking of the meaning of "*"

>> to be retrieved.  When I say "find title=*", I expect every title to
>> be retrieved.
>> What semantics am I hijacking?
> I am surprised you're still asking this after Adam and Seb have both
> provided good counter-examples.

I agree with Ralph.

Any representation of any data must consist of 'zero or more characters'.

I fail to see how you can possibly disagree with this?

No matter how you format pi, there are zero or more characters in the
representation.


To answer your questions:

> When you type "find date=*" to your _existing implementation_, what
> happens?

I reject it as I don't currently support truncation. As soon as I get a
chance to add it in, it would match every date in my index, because those
dates have zero or more characters in their representation.

> When you are searching a "more like this document" index, where the
> search term is a 10,000-word document, would you expect _that_ to work
> with "find moreLikeThis=*"?

That's not a real index, thus I wouldn't ever do that.

> When you are searching a set of points in (x,y) space, using a
> structure attribute (expressed in CQL as a relation modifier) that
> says query terms are of the form "465,1023", do you expect to find all
> terms using "find positionInSpace =/commaPair *"?  Or perhaps using
> "find positionInSpace =/commaPair *.*"?

Why would you say that the structure of the term is a commaPair when it
obviously isn't?  So I wouldn't do that.  If I did get it, I would reject
the query as being malformed. (term does not match structure)

Rob

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