I am in entire agreement with Rob on this issue.
Rob Sanderson writes:
> On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 10:02 -0400, Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress
> wrote:
> > > I do not believe that this approach was ever discussed; and in any
> > > case it is very much inferior to the simple use of "eq".
> >
> > Well first, I think 'eq' is a poor solution, and second, yes we did have
> > discussion -- endless discussion (on the Ed. Board list) and while it's
> > not productive to rehash it, it's worth highlighting a few conclusions:
> >
> > - it is confusing to have both an '=' and 'eq' relation
>
> Which is why we had scr /and/ a semi-magical = that did the right thing.
> Now we have one magical =, no scr and eq for equality.
>
> > - but '=' to replace 'scr' is overwhelming favored, so we need an equality
> > relation (to replace the changed '=') -- indeed anchoring was discussed, as
> > the way string matching is done for bibliographic data -- but an explicit
> > equality relation was also discussed
>
> And is fundamentally necessary.
>
>
> > So, neither '=' nor 'eq' is a solution for equality. As I look back on the
> > discussion it wasn't clear that 'exact' was to be depricated.
>
> Well, you wrote it in the list of changes for version 1.2, so at some
> point it was clear :)
>
> I don't see why 'eq' is not a solution, though.
>
> > I suggest 'exact' for explicit equality. I think it's better than 'eq'.
>
> Why?
>
> It's an arbitrary token that's defined in a context set, not the
> syntax.
>
> 'exact' has existing semantics of string equality. If we change the
> semantics of it to equality of any sort, then we have ambiguity between:
>
> number exact 1
>
> in the two versions.
>
> Is that a search for 1.0000000 or "1" ? In 1.1, it's always "1". In 1.2
> it would be up to the server to determine (unless there's a relation
> modifier specifying the term format).
>
> With =, this is tolerable because you can still do the right thing, and
> it was semi-magical anyway. But I don't agree with changing the
> semantics of exact, which had well defined semantics of string equality.
>
> What's wrong with eq?
>
> Rob
>
> --
> Dr Robert Sanderson
> Dept of Computer Science, University of Liverpool
> Home: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~azaroth/
> Cheshire: http://www.cheshire3.org/
|