RE: doubts about lists - part 2

We initially had a treatment of lists as syntactic sugar:
http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/Core/List_Constructor?action=recall
&rev=18 

We could give a recursive definition of Equal applied to lists.

-- Harold


-----Original Message-----
From: public-rif-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-rif-wg-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Michael Kifer
Sent: March 12, 2008 10:51 AM
To: RIF WG
Subject: doubts about lists - part 2




I should clarify myself in the previous post.

I was not proposing to drop lists from the syntax, but rather to drop
the semantic part altogether.
Since we have function symbols, as Hassan noted, let's just treat lists
as syntactic sugar.

We can have symbols, rif:listPair and rif:nilList, and encode things
like Seq(X,Y|W) in the usual way:
rif:listPair(X,rif:listPair(Y, rif:listPair(W,nilList)).

There is a slight problem with the fact that equality can make
Seq(a,b) equal Seq(a,b,c). (Say, by equating these two the same IRI.)
But we had the same problem with the semantics of lists.

Now I am thinking that it is easier to fix that through the semantics
than through syntactic restrictions. But it is not clear whether we
should care that distinct lists might become equal.

Any thoughts?


	--michael

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 14:45:53 UTC