[sc34wg3] TMQL: Scope and tuple sequences

[Lars Heuer]

Hi,

TMQL seems to support lists / scope not very well

    [O] boolean-primitive ::= @ anchor
                          ==> . @ == anchor
                         (==> . >> scope == anchor)

'anchor' is always a singleton (either a variable, a literal, or 
item reference), but scope consists of several themes (topics). 

While it might be okay to allow just a singleton for the shortcut above,
it seems that TMQL does not support multiple themes at all.

The following query seems to be invalid:

    (a) john-lennon / homepage[@en, private]

and the expanded form also:

    (b) john-lennon / homepage[. >> scope == (en, private)]

I think (b) should be supported by TMQL and it would also be valueable
to support (a).

But (b) leads me to another question... 


To my knowledge neither TMDM nor TMRM nor the TMDM->TMRM
implies any ordering (i.e. for scope).

My conclusion of this mismatch is, that the following query may 
produce an empty sequence:

    //person == //person

Since we have no ordering, the left hand side may, for example, produce

    (lennon, mccartney)

while the right hand side may produce

    (mccartney, lennon)

And therefor the "==" operation returns an empty sequence.

If this assumption holds true, query (b) may or may not produce a non
empty sequence (depends on the ordering of the sequence produced by
the scope axis), which is not very intuitive.

To make the query work in all cases, a user has to modify the query as
follows:

    john-lennon / homepage[@en & @private)]

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