preserves/questions.md

1.4 KiB

title
Open questions

Q. Should "symbols" instead be URIs? Relative, usually; relative to what? Some domain-specific base URI?

Q. Literal small integers: are they pulling their weight? They're not absolutely necessary.

Q. Should we go for trying to make the data ordering line up with the encoding ordering? We'd have to only use streaming forms, and avoid the small integer encoding, and not store record arities, and sort sets and dictionaries, and mask floats and doubles (perhaps like this), and perhaps pick a specific NaN, and I don't know what to do about SignedIntegers. Perhaps make them more like float formats, with the byte count acting as a kind of exponent underneath the sign bit.

  • Perhaps define separate additional canonicalization restrictions? Doesn't help the ordering, but does help the equivalence.

  • Canonicalization and early-bailout-equivalence-checking are in tension with support for streaming values.

Q. To remain compatible with JSON, portions of the text syntax have to remain case-insensitive (%i"..."). However, non-JSON extensions do not. There's only one (?) at the moment, the %i"f" in Float; should it be changed to case-sensitive?

Q. Should IOLists be wrapped in an identifying unary record constructor?