- From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) <len.bullard@intergraph.com>
- Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2006 13:43:42 -0600
- To: "'Henry S. Thompson'" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com
- Cc: Vincent.Quint@inrialpes.fr, www-tag@w3.org
I wish there were language comparisons that grounded this principle in examples. To repeat from XML-Dev: When selecting a language, how does one know when it has the 'least power'? o Is Assembler less or more powerful than C? o Is C less or more powerful than C++? o Is Lisp less or more powerful than Prolog? o Is RDF less or more powerful than Conceptual Graphs? o Are Conceptual Graphs more or less powerful than Topic Maps? o Are DTDs less or more powerful than Schematron? A principle or axiom is of no value without the rules for applying it. At least some examples? len From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] I realise I'm not altogether happy about the degree of vagueness of the appeal to 'power' in the current draft. In particular, I think we need to distinguish between expressiveness on the one hand and formal complexity on the other, whether worst-case time/space complexity or formal-language-theory complexity. Expressive richness is not necessarily 'bad' complexity -- consider boolean logic expressed with 0, 1 and Shaeffer stroke (== exclusive or) versus boolean logic expressed with and, or, implication and negation -- the latter is both more complex and _much_ easier to work with, but at _no_ additional cost. I think I'd be much happier if this were made clearer. ht
Received on Tuesday, 7 February 2006 19:43:47 UTC