Re: A proposal to restructure our top-level syntax

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So the two things that you lose on my proposal are the ability to
write a single recursive pipeline (because <p:pipeline> is untyped, on
my proposal, so there's no way to call it), and the ability to import
a single pipeline document.

Following the programming language analogy which partly informed my
proposal, here's a further step, which doesn't change the proposal in
any detail, but solves those two problems:

<p:pipeline>
 ...
</p:pipeline>

is just an abbreviation for

<p:pipeline-library>
 <p:declare-step type="main">
  <p:input port="!source" primary="yes"/> <!-- iff no primary input
                                                declared in the original-->
  <p:output port="!result" primary="yes"/> <!-- iff no primary output
                                                declared in the original-->
  ...
 </p:declare-step>
</p:pipeline-library>

And we say that running a pipeline library defaults to running the
step whose type is 'main'.

So now you can write a single recursive pipeline (it has a type you
can use to call it with now, namely 'main'), and you can import single
pipelines, because they are _really_ libraries after all.

ht 
- -- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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Received on Friday, 30 November 2007 15:13:27 UTC