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At 09:48 PM 3/1/2005 +0000, Dr Robert Sanderson wrote: >>>* matches zero or more characters. >>>For any field, "*" will match anything, no matter your internal >>>representation of the date. > >>Consider a server that does not support truncation at all. It _will_ >>have to do a special case in order to full this "new" requirement. But >>it will reject all other terms with * in it. That's not elegant. > >As opposed to a relation modifier, which may or may not be supported, with >special cases for the index, relation and value, which is somehow more >elegant than a not-very-special case for a term only? I beg to differ :) I think the kind of 'operator overload' which is implied in the use of '*' is an inherently bad idea. Much better to be explicit about what it is we want, and to get 'matches everything' on the table as a clear, pronounced requirement which is visible in the language. Why? Because CQL is already a complex language, and implementors are humans, and humans are likely to make any mistake or take any dumb shortcut you leave open to them in order to reach deadlines. I think buggy implementations of CQL are going to be one of the biggest threats to interoperability (once we get our SOAP toolkits straightened out, or drop SRW :-), and the easier and more clear we can make it, the better. --Sebastian -- Sebastian Hammer, Index Data <http://www.indexdata.dk/> Ph: +45 3341 0100, Fax: +45 3341 0101