Re: Issue #170 proposal - referencing to missing data

Whenever we mandate a fault, we must be very careful about ordering.  I 
would be reluctant to do anything that forced processsing, particularly of 
a large message, to proceed in any particular order. 

Consider the case where there are several problems with a message, some 
related to encoding and some not.  If we mandate the generartion of an 
encoding fault, then we might be forcing processors to do more decoding 
than the application needed to discover other problems.   Furthermore, 
there's a general issue of weak references.  What if you're doing RPC and 
by looking at argument #1 you decide that you don't even need to mess with 
argument #3.  Should we still mandate that you check for the fault in a 
bad reference out of #3? 

I think not.  Therefore I prefer Henrik's suggestion:  offer a standard 
fault that MAY be used, and indicate that failure to resolve a reference 
indicates that there is no value available for the node in the graph (a 
new state we haven't had before) and that processors MAY generate the 
standard fault when this situation arises.

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Noah Mendelsohn                                    Voice: 1-617-693-4036
Lotus Development Corp.                            Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
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Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2001 10:30:47 UTC