Re: Syntax of MINUS

On 31 Mar 2010, at 11:35, Andy Seaborne wrote:

> 
> 
> On 31/03/2010 11:11 AM, Alexandre Passant wrote:
>> 
>> On 31 Mar 2010, at 09:13, Andy Seaborne wrote:
>> 
>>> Should the syntax of MINUS be like UNION with {} on the left-hand side
>>> 
>>> { { ?s a foaf:Person
>>>    ?s foaf:name ?name
>>>  }
>>>  MINUS
>>>  { ?s foaf:knows ?other }
>>> }
>>> 
>>> or without:
>>> 
>>> { ?s a foaf:Person .
>>>  ?s foaf:name ?name .
>>>  MINUS { ?s foaf:name ?name }
>>> }
>> 
>> My preference for the second one, saves a few editing process when adding / removing a MINUS clause from an existing query.
> 
> For the record, we could change UNION to allow {}-less LHS
> 
> A chain of UNIONs would be
> 
>  pattern UNION { pattern } UNION { pattern }

Would be nice indeed.

Alex.

> 
> This has no effect on SPARQL 1.0 style queries.
> 
>  { pattern } UNION { pattern } UNION { pattern }
> 
> is still legal and the same semantics.  It's just a tweak to the grammar - the same AST and same algebra would result.
> 
> (Ditto any future INTERSECTION which would presumably be the same as doing a join and projecting to common variables in SPARQL).
> 
> 	Andy
> 

--
Dr. Alexandre Passant
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Galway
:me owl:sameAs <http://apassant.net/alex> .

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2010 11:00:16 UTC