[Bug 4285] [UPD] Replacing optional content

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=4285





------- Comment #7 from jonathan.robie@datadirect.com  2007-02-26 23:15 -------
(In reply to comment #1)
> The thing I don't like about this is that it special-cases operations on
> singletons. We should try to design operations that a general enough to work on
> sets or sequences.
> 
> Is it really that much of a hardship to do a delete first, then an insert?

There may not be a better solution. Optimizers can catch this fairly easily.

Unfortunately, users may try a variety of things to get around the problem, and
I'm not sure optimizers will catch all of them, so there is at least an
education issue (which could be addressed with a use case or an example in the
language book). It's especially confusing if you implement static typing, the
data is known to be there, but your system refuses to replace it because of
static typing (which is why many implementations won't implement the static
typing by the book).

Jonathan

Received on Monday, 26 February 2007 23:16:18 UTC