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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 :)
>
>> * is both right&left truncation in some views.
>
>
> Thankfully not the view of CQL, which is very clear that it is a masking
> character which matches zero or more characters.
The effect is the same. t* is right truncation. *t is left.

The important and confusing notion is that CQL uses * for masking. And
character masking is unrelated to complex numbers, date ranges etc where
character masking does not make sense.

>>>> case, since obvioulsy * is special and does not _really_ do "full
>>>> truncation".
>>>
>>> I don't follow what you mean by 'full truncation' as opposed to what is
>>> being described.
>
>
>> A full truncation could be one that looks up in a dictionary and find
>> all words.. then merge all ISAM lists.. A '*' special case might not
>> look up in a dictionary at all.
>
>
> That's purely an implementation detail. It's not important to know if the
> server performs 'full truncation' or not.
If I want my server to perform character masking, I tell it to. If I
don't want character masking I don't tell it to. You want me to tell my
server to do character masking for all indexes. Doesn't make sense to me.

Let's leave things as they are. A profile can always make a "proper" way
of doing things.

For example if we are talking date ranges it makes more sence to do
   date > 1970
or
   date > 0
than
   date = '*'
IMHO.

/ Adam

>
> Rob
>
>       ,'/:.          Dr Robert Sanderson ([log in to unmask])
>     ,'-/::::.        http://www.o-r-g.org/~azaroth/
>   ,'--/::(@)::.      Dept. of Computer Science, Room 805
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