Re: declaredAs

Just to be clear, the distinction I made (typing and declarations,  
i.e., use/resource kind and intended resource kind) has been made  
several times in this thread, usually by Boris. However, it seemed to  
me that Michael confused them, or at least didn't seem to notice the  
second and its uses. Perhaps this is an artifact of the "typo" example.

Also, it's important to reiterate that if we disallowed metamodeling  
(e.g., punning) and required a fully separated vocabulary, then there  
is much less need for representing the "intended" resource kind  
distinct from its use since *any* "duel use" (e.g., class and  
property) will show up as a syntax error. We don't want to forbid  
metamodelling, and we could still only work with use types (how you  
use it is what it is). But then we can't express various sensible  
bits of advice about the intended nature of terms. The goldilocks  
solution is to allow the expression of things in between by means of  
some sort of annotation or description.

The situation is a bit like typing in programming languages. If you  
required declarations (and implicit typing everywhere) then you have  
Java and the like (mainifestly typed languages). If you are  
completely use-typed, you have languages like Smalltalk or Python. If  
you goldilocks it, then you have languages like ML or Haskell or  
perhaps common lisp, where you don't need to put type declarations  
everywhere, but when you do they make a difference (esp. to the type  
inference; i.e., you can get clashes).

It's not exact, but I hope it helps.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 7 August 2007 16:27:23 UTC