[sc34wg3] Template parameters in CTM

[Robert Cerny]

On Jan 29, 2010, at 3:30 PM, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

> Lars Heuer and I are discussing a corner case in CTM, and whether  
> it should be legal or not. In other words, we're not discussing  
> what the spec says, but what it *should* say. You can see some the  
> discussion on
>   http://projects.topicmapslab.de/issues/1908
>
> [...]
>
> This is also legal:
>
> def has-psi($t, $psi)
>   $t $psi .
> end
>
> foo has-psi( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton ).
>
> Here, the URI is interpreted as a subject identifier added to the  
> topic. Again, no problem.
>
> We could also do this:
>
> foo instance-of( = http://example.org/not-good-modelling ).
>
> Here the parameter is interpreted as a topic referred to by its  
> subject locator. Obviously fine. But what about this? (And please  
> don't be confused by the name of the template.)
>
> foo has-psi( = http://example.org/some-resource ).
>
> Is this an error because we are passing a topic to $psi, which  
> cannot be a topic because of how it's used inside the template, or  
> is it OK because we're really passing a subject locator assignment,  
> so that it becomes equivalent to:
>
> foo = http://example.org/some-resource .
>
> Thoughts, anyone?

As far as i understand your email and issue 1908, there seem to be  
two issues here:

A. Allowing all kind of topic references to be passed to templates,  
including references to topics via their subject locators. This would  
relieve the topic map author of making the subject locator assignment  
explicit.
B. Allowing arguments to have multiple types. has-psi in your example  
seems to accept strings and topic references.

I am for strongly A, because if you just want to mention an identity  
of a subject you should not have to make a statement about it.
I am not so strongly against B, because it makes reading harder,  
although i really appreciate this feature in programming languages  
(but mostly as an author). I would be in favor of B if you could  
split the template definition over several bodies.

Side note: i really like ctm. It did not take me a long time to get  
productive with it. The most frequent syntactical error that i make  
usually involves line endings.

Best,

Robert Cerny

Software Development
http://www.cerny-online.com