Re: Please review: syntactic sugar and polishing (ISSUE-54, ISSUE-56, ISSUE-59, ISSUE-60)

Hi all

On 30/08/2011 16:37, David McNeil wrote:
> There are trade-offs to offering syntactic sugar, I would like the 
> group to consciously consider the trade-offs and take a position. I 
> think the core tradeoff is a simple spec, with a single way to perform 
> a task, vs a "sugared" spec with more wrinkles but more concise for 
> common cases. There are implementation and education costs to these 
> wrinkles. Personally, I think it makes sense to avoid the sugar in 1.0 
> of the spec, but if the consensus is towards sugar in 1.0 then I could 
> go along with that.
David, as you said "sugared" spec will more concise for common cases ...
Regarding the implementation and education costs I don't have some much 
experience, but I don't think it would be hard to include the "wrinkles" 
once you already have an implementation.


>     ISSUE-54: Simpler constant-valued term maps
>     http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/track/issues/54
>
>     Instead of this:
>
>        [] rr:predicateMap [ rr:predicate ex:foo ].
>
>     you now have to write one of these two forms:
>
>        [] rr:predicateMap [ rr:constant ex:foo ].
>        [] rr:predicate ex:foo.
>
>
> I think this is a good change (assuming we want a sugared spec) 
> because constant predicates seem to be the norm for the use cases I 
> have seen.
>
+1
>
>     ISSUE-56: Default termType for template-valued term maps should be IRI
>     http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/track/issues/56
>
>
> This makes sense to me.
+1
>
>     The default term type is now always rr:IRI, except for rr:column
>     in an object map.
>
>
> I need to think this through more. Seems this is a bit different than 
> ISSUE-56?
>
>     ISSUE-59: Syntactic sugar for triples maps that only have a single
>     predicate-object map
>     http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/track/issues/59
>
>
> I am curious what use-case you have in mind for this. Seems to me that 
> this is primarily useful for simple examples or getting started 
> because I expect most mappings to involve multiple columns from a 
> table. From that perspective this does not look like a useful change 
> to me.
>
>     ISSUE-60: Syntactic sugar for the simple case of logical tables
>     http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/track/issues/60
>
>     Instead of this:
>
>     <#TriplesMap1> rr:logicalTable [ rr:tableName "EMP" ].
>
>     you can now also write this equivalent form:
>
>     <#TriplesMap1> rr:tableName "EMP".
>
>
> I think this is a good change (assuming we want a sugared spec).
+1
>
> -David