Re: Proposed requirements: Operations on primitive types

* Robert Barta
| 
| I agree with Lars that typing actually belongs to the TMCL problem
| domain.

If there's agreement on this I think we should say as much in the
requirements document.

| This makes sense as things like integer, float, date... all form
| their own 'ontology'. What would be nice if we could keep the
| languages themselves free of these 'basic types' and add them via
| ontologies (just to use some notation): [...]

That's an appealing idea, but I think it would be difficult to do this
in practice, at least for the more important types. Adding support
for, say, numbers through an add-on seems to me clearly non-trivial.
Also, if we take too much out of the basic QL and into extensions we
hurt interoperability, which was the reason for creating the QL in the
first place...

However, for the less common data types (complex numbers?) this might
be an option, provided we can get it into the language without
creating too much complexity.

Does anyone feel we have a requirement here?

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >