Re: High-level comments on datatyping draft

Sergey:
>Finally, I think that global datatyping (Sec. 3.2) is out of scope of the
>current document. At this point of time we do not have a mechanism
>robust enough to standardize on global datatyping.

Brian:
> I interpret these comments in the light of your preference for tidy
literals.

I think not ...

my understanding (which dates from before my holiday and during Brian's!) is
that the WG appeared to have a consensus (minus at least Patrick) forming
around not doing a global idiom.

I am not up to date on what has happened while I have been relaxing.

My understanding of the motivations are:
- the WG has had a mild majority in favour of tidy global idiom
- the community process showed a majority in favour of untidy global
- many members of the WG, including myself, concluded that we cannot reach
*consensus* on a global idiom

Thus, I have argued that even with the community backing, while I still
believe in the untidy global idiom, I do not think it is ready for
standardization.

This discussion is deliberately punting on tidiness an issue that Patrick at
no point let us forget is model theoretic in nature.

My sense at the last telecon I attended was that if we had been asked the
following questions:

* we resolve not to do a global datatype idiom
* we agree that we all can live with both a tidy or an untidy model theory
* we will have an e-mail discussion and then a straw poll on tidiness

that, with the probable exception of Patrick, many of the WG would have gone
along with that. For instance, my position of favouring untidiness is a lot
less rigid once we have dropped the ambition to do global datatyping. I
suspect that those who favour tidiness likewise could live with untidiness
if it purely in the model theory and not part of datatyping.

Jeremy

Received on Tuesday, 27 August 2002 16:47:05 UTC