Re: Proposal to move sourceID to be integers

On May 7, 2013, at 2:51 PM, Martin Thomson wrote:

> On 7 May 2013 11:28, Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no> wrote:
>> I am wondering if it's equally effective (or ineffective) in terms of
>> "avoiding the unconstrained string" to specify that these constraints must
>> be valid identifiers out of some identifier space (in this case, the space
>> of valid device identifiers).
> 
> Yes, that works.
> 
> To varying degrees.  The set of valid identifiers might not be known
> at the time that the constraint is accepted, but the form of
> identifiers should be known, preventing completely unconstrained
> strings.  Of course, that's all based on the premise that
> unconstrained strings are bad.  I'm not sure that I've seen any
> evidence of that (I assume that this came up on the call).
> 

Martin, I explained on the call that I have been trying to avoid allowing "unconstrained strings" as a type because of my strong belief that once you allow it people will lazily add new constraints as the "unconstrained string" type because it's easier.

Regarding Harald's suggestion, there is a big difference between syntax checking a list of enumerated values and syntax checking against some grammar.

My read of this thread so far is that we don't have agreement (yet) on Cullen's proposal for integer SourceIds, nor in fact on any proposal other than "arbitrary string".

Received on Tuesday, 14 May 2013 13:00:26 UTC