- From: Florent Georges <fgeorges@fgeorges.org>
- Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:38:59 +0100
- To: Adam Retter <adam@exist-db.org>
- Cc: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>, public-expath@w3.org
On 14 March 2013 12:39, Adam Retter wrote:
> e.g. sm:chmod(xs:anyURI("/db/myfile.xml"), "0770")
Honestly, the Unix permissions octal representation is not
representing a number. I mean no one look at a number here, it just
happens that the permissions have 3 values, for 3 different "persons",
so an octal representations of 3 bits looked like a good idea. And
actually it was not because it constrained the value space to 3
different permissions (R, W and X). I always used the "symbolic" for
that purpose (e.g. "rw-rw----", which is not more symbolic, just
another representation), both as a user or to implement it (I don't
remember where I needed that, but I did once).
But that is behind the point I think, the point is that a number has
no base. Each single one of its representation has a base (well, in
position-based representations at least). The base is then used to
parse and serialize numbers, but not for the numerical operations in
memory.
Regards,
--
Florent Georges
http://fgeorges.org/
http://h2oconsulting.be/
Received on Thursday, 14 March 2013 13:39:52 UTC