[glue-wg] Question about multiplicity in GLUE 2.0 Specification

[Paul Millar]

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.