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Posted by Davmon on 04/10/06 11:32
Neredbojias arranged shapes to form:
> To further the education of mankind, Davémon <"davémon"@nospam.com>
> declaimed:
>
>>> In a more logical design, empty lists might be allowed as a
>>> placeholder for a list, or as a construct that will dynamically be
>>> transformed to a non-empty list by adding list items. But browsers
>>> (and other interested parties) would then have to be prepared to
>>> handling empty lists meaningfully.
>>
>> I agree 100% with your rationale, and 0% with the conculsion! MathML
>> might well allow empty [set] definitions if they are useful to maths,
>> but the idea of empty lists doesn't seem logical at all to language or
>> document mark-up.
>
> In computer-related languages, the first thing is usually the "0" thing.
> Javascript, for example, numbers the initial item in the images array (-and
> all arrays) "0". It can be argued that a zero item should be an empty item
> but the logical fact is that even an empty item is one part of the set of
> "whatever" selected from all possible parts of the set of "whatever". An
> empty list is conceptually still a list if originally defined so and not
> nothing (-using the double negative in its correct form.)
Ok, so say you've got an array in PHP, Perl, Javascript or whatever, and
you're going to output it to HTML. If the array is empty - should we output
nothing at all because there is no list, or output <ul></ul> to denote that
the set is there?
--
Davémon
http://www.nightsoil.co.uk/
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