RE: ISSUE-126 (Revisit Datatypes): A new proposal for the real <-> float <-> double conundrum

At 12:41 PM +0100 2008-07-05, Michael Kay wrote:

>Since the types date, time, dateTime, gYear, gYearMonth, gMonth, gMonthDay,
>and gDay are disjoint in both their value spaces and lexical spaces, I would
>have thought it quite easy to define a primitive type that is essentially
>the union of all of these (it might or might not be abstract), and derive
>these 8 types from this new type by restriction. Where exactly is the
>difficulty?

I don't see that moments in time, segments of time, and repeating
intervals make up a sensible datatype.  That's my particular problem
with the idea.  E.g., how does one define order?  Is 14:00:00 less
than or equal to 1997?

However, it could be done, even if the value space seemed to contain
apples and oranges, so to speak.  Just as the anySimpleType and
anyAtomicType are artificially constructed datatypes.  Why hasn't
it been suggested before?

I'm curious how the simplification would be effected for QT.
-- 
Dave Peterson

davep@iit.edu

Received on Sunday, 6 July 2008 03:32:29 UTC