[sc34wg3] TMCL and MAX_INT

[Lars Marius Garshol]

In the Norwegian national body comments [1] I wrote:

> The MAX_INT literal is used to represent the biggest possible  
> integer in
> order to be able to express unrestricted maximum cardinalities while  
> using the templates. The problem is that this is not a legal integer  
> literal according to XML Schema.
>
> Possible solutions:
>
> * Find some way to shoehorn MAX_INT into CTM (and XTM 1.0/2.0!).
>
> * Support optional arguments in CTM templates.
>
> * Introduce topics representing cardinalities and have predefined  
> topics for 0-1, 1-1, 0-*, and 1-*. Omit the max-card occurrence to  
> make the cardinality unlimited. Pass these topics to the template  
> instead of the integers.
>
> * Define extra templates (with different names) which omit the max  
> cardinality argument (implicitly setting it to infinity).

Graham's reply to this was:

>  Comment: Proposals welcome. What does TMQL do?

TMQL does not need to represent the concept of infinity, so there is  
no support for this in TMQL. I'm not sure there should be, either.

As for proposals, four of them are given above. My personal preference  
is for number 3, which I think should handle the majority of cases  
quite well, but it would be interesting to hear what others think.

[1] http://www.isotopicmaps.org/pipermail/sc34wg3/2008-October/003858.html

--Lars M.
http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/
http://www.garshol.priv.no/tmphoto/