[sc34wg3] Supporting variants in TMCL

[Motomu Naito]

Dear Pepper-san,

On behalf of non-SAE, I greatly appreciate your effort.

> * Lars Marius Garshol
> |
> | * Steve Pepper
> | >
> | > Are Naito-san and I really the only two users of non-SAE languages
> | > that care about variant names? Are they not widely used in Korea
> | > and China, for example, as well as Japan? What about topic maps in
> | > Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, etc. etc.?
> |
> | So far there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for supporting variant
> | names in TMCL.
> 
> That might be symptomatic of a more general apathy. Or of the fact that
> most
> users of Topic Maps do not (yet) have the same needs as Naito-san.*
> 
> | The biggest problem with adding support is that variant
> | names have no type, and so it is difficult to see how to express the
> | matching part of the constraint. In all other constraints we use
> | tmcl:constrain-statement or something similar, but that doesn't work
> | for variants.
> 
> I hope you excuse me if I say that I don't find this argument particularly
> compelling. Surely if a language cannot meet a legitimate requirement,
then
> there is a problem with the language, not with the requirement?
> 
> Unfortunately I don't understand the inner workings of TMCL well enough
> to be
> able to propose a solution. But are you sure you are not trying to create
> something more general than is really needed? Would it help if I were to
> formulate a constraint in English that I believe would do the job:
> 
>   NAMES of type "foo" belonging to
>    TOPICS of type "bar" can or must have (one or more)
>     VARIANTS in the scope "baz"
> 
> In other words, we need to be able to constrain every variant statement
> on the
> basis, not of its type, but of what type of name it is a variant of (and
> what
> type of topic that name belongs to).
> 
> Naito-san: Would that satisfy your requirements?
>

In the case of
http://www.infoloom.com/pipermail/topicmapmail/2009q2/007497.html,
if I can constrain variants according to type of NAMES, type of TOPIC and
type of SCOPE,
it meets my requirement I think.

As Gulbrandsen-san says, I would like to read Baldauf-san's paper.

Best regards,

Motomu Naito
 
> Steve
> 
> * In the old days this committee used to bend over backwards to
accommodate
> everyone with a valid use case - even if they were in a minority.
>