Re: Naming ports vs. naming documents

Norman Walsh wrote:
> / Richard Tobin <richard@inf.ed.ac.uk> was heard to say:
> | I'm assuming that there's a component description somewhere with the
> | signature of the component in it.  The XSLT component has "source" and
> | "stylesheet" inputs and a "result" output, so all instances of the
> | XSLT component have them.  There is no need for any ports to be
> | mentioned in the pipeline except to connect them up. 
> 
> I see. Yes, that would work, but I think I'd prefer to make all the
> inputs and outputs explicit in each step even if it's not technically
> necessary. I think allowing all those defaults would make pipelines
> much harder to read.

I agree. Having defaults and assumptions raises the bar for language 
knowledge. By making them explicit, they become pretty straight-forward 
to understand. However, it may be argued that by not having defaults, it 
will be more "tedious" to code pipelines by hand (but that's what GUIs 
are for).


Cheers,
Rui

P.S. I'm still playing catch-up on the mailing list, since I've been on 
holidays for 1.5 weeks.