Hi David, Thanks for looking through the document. On Tuesday 24 March 2009 15:17:16 David Horat wrote:
On GLUE 2.0 Specification v. 2.0 from 3rd March 2009, which is the latest, I see that the multiplicity field is specified as '*', '0..*' or '1..*'.
Correct.
I assume that '*' is the same as '0..*' as this is the standard convention.
Your assumption is correct; in fact, the term is defined on page 6.
Anyway it should be good to concrete it for every field and just have either '0..*' or '1..*'. So, is this specification still open for little changes like this?
The two terms '*' and '0..*' refer to the same concept: zero or more items. Using two terms for the same concept is an inconsistency in the document, which should be fixed. I guess this should be recorded in some errata document (wiki page, etc) initially. I'm not sure how documents are updated within OGF. From a quick scan through the document I found (only) five places where '0..*' is used, the remainder are '*'. Also the term '*' is defined whereas '0..*' isn't. So to fix the inconsistency we should change the five occurances of the '0..*' term to '*'. That said, I'm also in favour of '0..*' because to me it's meaning is clearer and is more in keeping with the other term: '1..*'. I'm not sure how others feel about changing '*' to '0..*'. Cheers, Paul.