doubts about lists - part 2

• From: Michael Kifer <kifer@cs.sunysb.edu>
• Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:50:38 -0400
• To: public-rif-wg@w3.org (RIF WG)
• Message-ID: <15750.1205329838@cs.sunysb.edu>

I should clarify myself in the previous post.

I was not proposing to drop lists from the syntax, but rather to drop the
semantic part altogether.
Since we have function symbols, as Hassan noted, let's just treat lists as
syntactic sugar.

We can have symbols, rif:listPair and rif:nilList, and
encode things like Seq(X,Y|W) in the usual way:
rif:listPair(X,rif:listPair(Y, rif:listPair(W,nilList)).

There is a slight problem with the fact that equality can make
Seq(a,b) equal Seq(a,b,c). (Say, by equating these two the same IRI.)
But we had the same problem with the semantics of lists.

Now I am thinking that it is easier to fix that through the semantics than
through syntactic restrictions. But it is not clear whether we should care
that distinct lists might become equal.

Any thoughts?


	--michael  

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 13:50:58 UTC