[REBOL] Re: ANN: custom-types.r
From: bry:itnisk at: 14-Mar-2003 14:58
b>> Can this be used to make types which are xml fragments?
>I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but I think the answer is
>no.
I was thinking about WXSDL (W3C Xml Schema Definition Language) and its
way of handling datatypes. To give a short and highly incomplete
run-through: You can define your own types which are xml instances in a
document, then you can refer to these types in building new types.
The xml tag name could be a complex type consisting of the following two
tags:
<firstName>John</firstName>
<surname>Doe</surname>
the tags firstName and surname could be defined as being of type
xsd:string(which is, as it no doubt indicates, a string datatype).
In xml schema the idea is (personally don't know how good of an idea I
find it) that you can later define a type CompanyPersonName which
inherits from PersonName but also requires a tag
<addressableAs>Mr.</addressableAs> which could have a datatype of an
enumeration list of possible values: mr. mrs. Ms. Dude.
Well maybe not the last.
The reason why I was thinking about it was that, although I hate WXSDL
it is, just from its prominence of use in .Net and various Microsoft
products/initiatives - not to mention governmental initiatives
(governments tending to blindly require that one use W3C stuff),
becoming quite useful to know and use.
I remember that someone asked about the possibility to do a schema to
rebol conversion, which I thought would not be especially useful,
however if the following would allow defining types that were xml
instances then one would be somewhat begun on the road to doing this
(another thing that would be required would be support for Unicode and
Regex however).
What I was interested in at the time of the schema to rebol discussion
involved having something like in .Net where one can have runtime
conversion between WXSDL datatypes and .Net datatypes.
