- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Mon, 18 Aug 1997 11:09:40 PDT
- To: "ejw@ics.uci.edu" <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
- CC: "Harald Alvestrand (E-mail)" <Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no>, "Keith Moore (E-mail)" <moore@cs.utk.edu>, "'WEBDAV Mailing List'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
> - The Depth header (and hence recursive semantics for method invocations) > should be moved to a separate specification, which will proceed separately > from draft-ietf-webdav-protocol. There was a suggestion to not use a Depth > header, but to instead define separate functions (e.g., DEEPCOPY) for the > recursive analog to existing methods. My experience is that recursive or multi-level methods for copying data structures are actually quite varied, and that the reason for doing the separation is that you will find that you need more information than just the depth to determine the actual semantics of the operation, and that further "copy to N levels" is fundamentally a different operation than "just copy this top-level operation". (E.g., as a point to consider, note that typical Lisp language definitions have had many different copy operations, depending on how carefully they attempted to preserve structure. While it is possible to overload a single copy operation just by adding additional parameters, the implementations were considerably different.) -- http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter
Received on Monday, 18 August 1997 14:11:15 UTC