[sc34wg3] CTM / TMCL Issue: Wildcards - Do we need them?

[Lars Heuer]

Hi all, especially TMCL-editors,

The current CTM draft contains *three* mechanisms to create topics
with an automatically generated item identifier.

The anonymous wildcard and the named wildcard were introduced because
TMCL needed them. In Oslo this year we introduced a new notation to
embed topics:

      [-"Topic with an autogenerated iid"]

Now, I took a look at the TMCL draft dtd. 2007-12-08 and I wonder if
we need the "?" and "?foo" notation at all; it seems that the []
notation is enough.

A random example from TMCL:

  def AssociationTypeConstraint()
      ?atc1 isa associationtype-constraint
      AddConstraintToSchema(?atc1)
  end


which can replaced by:

   def AssociationTypeConstraint()
       AddConstraintToSchema([isa associationtype-constraint])
   end


Another example:

  def isAbstract($topictype)
    ?attc1 isa abstract-topictype-constraint
    applies-to(*attc1 : constraint-role, $topictype : topictype-role)
    AddConstraintToSchema(?attc1)
  end

Replacement:


  def applies-to($role, $topic)
      applies-to(constraint-role: $role, topictype-role: $topic)
  end

  def isAbstract($topictype)
    AddConstraintToSchema([isa abstract-topictype-constraint;
                           applies-to($topictype)
                           ]
                           )
  end


It seems that every ?foo is replaceable with [] since [] allows a more
complete topic definition.

If ?foo and ? is not needed for TMCL (anymore), I'd be more than happy
if we can remove them from CTM. That would simplify CTM a bit.

Best regards,
Lars
-- 
Semagia 
<http://www.semagia.com>