Re: [ba-ohs-talk] GUI Ideas and NODAL
On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Peter Jones wrote: (01)
> And I'm not sure I agree with the definition of a text document as solely "a
> sequence of lines, represented as strings". I think this point is going to
> prove very controversial. For me, a text document should just be a sequence
> of characters (char[]) at the lowest API level, with '\n' just being another
> character. The interpretation of '\n' as a line-breaking character depends
> on the task in hand. This means that I might want to optionally specify how
> the file data is picked up depending on what I have in mind. Most
> programming language already have a 'getline' type function in their core
> libraries. (02)
This is one of the main differences between NODAL and Groves. In NODAL,
nodes are units of data with metadata attached -- version history, access
control privileges, etc. A NODAL data model naturally results in a model
for addressing documents, but that doesn't seem to be its primary purpose. (03)
Defining a data model for addressability is the primary purpose of a
Groves data model. So, for example, if you have a Groves data model for a
text file consisting of a sequence of nodes, where each node has a single
string property consisting of a line of a document, then the smallest unit
you can address in that document is a line of text. To allow
character-level addressability, you would have to define nodes that
contained character properties. I explain this in detail in my
introductory paper on Groves: (04)
http://www.eekim.com/ohs/papers/grovesintro/index.html (05)
This is one of my issues with NODAL. If I want to specify that a document
in NODAL be addressed as a long string of characters, even if the NODAL
data model defines the document as a list of strings, how do I do that? (06)
-Eugene (07)
--
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
| "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they |
+===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+ (08)