Re: identifiers and literal semantics

Garret Wilson wrote:

>
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding literals, because I'm having a bit of a 
> problem using them and understanding how they work with identifiers. 
> Please let me know where I'm going wrong.

You would be alot better off if you consider literals and resources as 
disjoint.

>
> As I understand them, a literal is simply a lexical representation of 
> some value. The string "5", for instance, stands for the value of the 
> fifth counting number, but there could be other lexical 
> representations for the same value (e.g. "V" in Roman numerals, or the 
> Urdu character for "5").

Yes but the literal that stands for the number 5 is not "5" rather 
"5"^^xsd:int where the xsd:int datatype represents the lexical to value 
mapping. The lexical space 
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#lexical-space of xsd:int/xsd:decimal 
requires decimal digits, and does not allow roman numerals (that might 
be another datatype e.g. foo:roman).
...

> That's fine, so far, but how do I *identify* the string of characters 
> I'm talking about---"5"?

Simply as a literal i.e. "5" => "5"

Jonathan