Re: Issue 231 options

>> Noah, as usual, you do have a point. 8-)

As I would say the same of you, thank you! (ain't these
mutual admiration societies great?)

>> I think the goal you formulated is better than the one
>> I wrote, and it's what I would have written had I
>> thought about those "self-describing is unnecessary for
>> me" cases.  Thank you.

>> But in the current SOAP Encoding, neither goal is met.
Right.

>> If we don't mandate arraySize (or any other indication
>> that an array is an array and not a generic or a
>> struct), the receiver will not be able to be certain
>> that the sender would really have used arraySize if it
>> was an array.

Right.  Also no way to distinguish struct from generic
(I.e. we are somewhat vague on distinguishing a data
structure which was known to be capable of duplicate
selectors, but didn't have any in this instance, from
one that could not have had them in the first place.
Not sure we need to make this distinction, but we
should think about the choice before deciding.

>> If we do agree with your goal (as I do), we'll not only
>> need to mark arrays, but also generics (the two
>> distinct kinds of them I have described multiple times
>> before) and structs, so that an empty compound is
>> distinguished from a simple type.
Right.

>> I don't think such a change would cause a second Last
>> Call and it would solve the issues with generics, too,
>> at least for me.

Not sure, and from a process point of view I don't
really feel I have standing to raise this as an issue at this
point unless it's truly critical to our success.  Seems
like you may feel this way, in which case you may have
such standing :-), but I probably can't justify doing
it myself.  I've known about this tradeoff since 1.1,
and having not raised it for 2 years, I'm not sure it's
fair for me to pursue it now.  If the WG wants to make
this change, and it doesn't take us back to last call,
it's OK with me (as long as we do it in a way that
isn't completely inconsistent with schema typing, and I
expect anything we're likely to propose will pass that
test.  I presume we're talking about something like an
attribute:

        enc:composite="struct"

or some such?)

Many thanks.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
------------------------------------------------------------------

Received on Monday, 9 September 2002 18:11:50 UTC