Re: RIF Working Group needs namespace name for xpath "op"

Sandro Hawke wrote:
> What's wrong with implementing and providing them?  If someone wants to
> compare two numbers, why should they not use a function identified as
> op:numeric-greater-than ?
>   

Hi Sandro,

I think the purpose of using XPath is to refer to something that already 
exists, and there is no namespace for these operators. The reason there 
is no namespace for these operators is that the Working Group did not 
intend them for external use, but as a way of documenting the semantics 
of our language's operators. The operators of XPath have a simple 
syntactic representation, e.g. > means greater than.

The rest of the world currently refers to this as >, not as 
op:greater-than or some XQueryX construct.

> Yes, this may be the key motivator.  RIF (at this level) does not want
> polymorphism.  We want to say numeric-greater-than and
> dateTime-less-than and have them be different.  For one thing, we may
> want to require some of them but not others in a given profile/dialect,
> and have their presense/absence be obvious from the syntax.
>   

Wouldn't people have to look up which of these functions you provide 
anyway?

One way to do this would be to emulate the operator mapping table in 
XQuery/XPath:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/#mapping

Jonathan