rationals or reals?

Just a forward from little discussion we just had in the lunch break. 
Consider e.g. the following setting: We allow rationals as datatype, but 
not the reals. If we also have multiplication, then it would be possible 
to specify a class

smallSquare: all squares with sideLength*sideLength < 2

What happens then (since we're over the rationals) is that this class 
would be empty (because sideLength would not resolve in a rational).

My feeling is that this is very unintuitive. It might be preferrable to 
use the reals (instead of the rationals) for defining the semantics - if 
that is possible.

I take from the email Carsten just wrote that Racer, for example, also 
does not support rationals, but reals.

Pascal.

-- 
PD Dr. Pascal Hitzler
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe
email: hitzler@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de    fax: +49 721 608 6580
web:   http://www.pascal-hitzler.de   phone: +49 721 608 4751
Springer Lehrbuch:          http://semantic-web-grundlagen.de

Received on Friday, 7 December 2007 11:16:09 UTC