[om] [CfD] Small Standard Change (make CD, Symbol and Variable names QNames)

[Mike Dewar]

Just to clarify what David said:

- The reason for the current restrictions on CD names was to make it
  possible to create a file of the same name on a range of filesystems
  (not least ISO 9600).

- The reason for the restriction on symbol names was because it was
  thought that a symbol was essentially an internal object and could
  easily have rendering rules associated in various contexts.  Keeping a
  simple scheme which all software could support therefore seemed
  sensible.

- The reason why variable names are so permissive is to allow for
  automatic rendering schemes, since unlike symbols there is no easy way
  to associate rendering with variables apart from attribution.  

I'm not suggesting that this is the only approach but your description
of the current naming schemes as "a zoo" suggests that you don't
appreciate the reasoning behind the current system.

Cheers, Mike.

On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 11:04:14PM +0100, David Carlisle wrote:
> 
> 
> This would allow most unicode characters as symbol (and Cd) names which 
> is rather a big change and historically there has been some resistance
> to allowing (say) the gamma symbol to have name a greek gamma rather
> than the ascii string "gamma". Especially in the case of cd names
> allowing full unicode strings makes simple mapping to filesystem names
> (or uri's) slightly problematic.
> 
> It's not that this is necessarily a bad thing but 
> > I have another standard change to propose.
> I suspect this is a bigger change than you indicate.
> 
> 
> Also I'm not sure that allowing Qnames by allowing ":" into symbolnames
> is the right model, if you were wanting to map OM symbols into an XML
> namespace world I'd have thought that something like
> <x:symbname xmlns:x="some uri corresponding to cdname"/>
> would be quite natural. However you would not be able to do this if teh
> symbolname contained a : already.
> 
> David
> 
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