[tmql-wg] Proposed requirements: Operations on primitive types

[Mary Nishikawa]

*Lars Marius Garshol
>One issue we have not discussed so far is to what extent we should
>support primitive types and operations on them. That is, should a
>query be allowed to interpret internal occurrences as containing
>numbers? Dates?

This seems reasonable and necessary.
I think we need to revisit the question, "what are Topic Maps for anyway?"
Where would topic maps fit in the storage and access of data objects?
We would need it, if we are getting into this business. Are we?
I really can't answer this.
The subject comes up (storage of data types) with engineers whenever I 
discuss topic maps with then.

>And, if we support this, should we also support operations on these
>values? That is, basic arithmetic functions on numbers like plus,
>minus, multiplication, etc? String operations like those of XPath?
>Date functions? Regular expressions?

It would be a valuable extension, but whether it should be in the 
requirements for the language is debatable, I think.

Cheers,
Mary