Re: Component interfaces

/ Alessandro Vernet <avernet@orbeon.com> was heard to say:
| 1) Should inputs/outputs be passed by position only (e.g. just one
| sequence), by name only, or by a combination of both?
|
| My take - If we draw a parallel between components and functions in
| most programming languages, function inputs (called parameters), in
| general have names. And I think this is a good practice. Instead of
| having the XSLT component take a sequence of 2 documents, where the
| first one is the stylesheet and the second one is the data on which
| the stylesheet should be applied, I prefer to the XSLT component to
| have two named inputs: "stylesheet" and "dataToTransform", each one
| possibly validated with a schema.

I prefer named parameters as well, but if we want to allow components
to be chained together, I think we have to allow for the possibility
that inputs won't be named.

We have a model for "positional parameters": a sequence of nodes.
We don't have a model for a map or hash of parameters and I'm loathe
to invent it if we can avoid it.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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