On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Mike Beckerle wrote: In case there is any misuderstanding: I think Mike's approach is fine. It focuses on what I think is the main issue, which is how to talk about the indexing. IMO, the main point of an array is that it is a blob with an index scheme.
re: Space - a space penalty only occurs if your DFDL implementation actually converts the data into XML. My personal plans for DFDL would do none of that. You would incur zero space penalty. I want to reemphasize here, that the "index attributes" x and y in my example, would take up exactly zero space. They have no representation. Their values are inferred by the positon of the elements of the array.
Sure. But sometimes people need to pass the data as XML, and if they do, it's going to be an issue.
re: algorithms - DFDL doesn't address APIs for access to data at all.
My earlier email had several unstated assumptions. I'm approaching this from a grid perspective, especially, service composition. The 'algorithms' I'm thinking of are what a client does to construct a request for specific elements of an array from a server, and what the server must do to provide the data in the way the requester wants it. I'm assuming DFDL is used in this protocol.