ADQL-2.1 internal draft

[Mark Taylor]

Marco/Dave/DAL,

On Fri, 5 Jun 2015, Marco Molinaro wrote:

> Dear DAL members,
> a first internal draft of the ADQL-2.1 document in available online,
> linked on the IVOA TWiki at
> 
> http://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/ADQL
> 
> (it is also attached to this mail and the source is available on volute,
> reference revision 2983)
> 
> The draft has been prepared by Dave Morris, has some issues left to fix,
> like boolean types and hexadecimal literals.
> Also the BNF of the language has to be completed.
> Nonetheless is available for comments and contributions and will be
> presented and discussed at oncoming Sesto Interop (a week or so from now)
> in the DAL TAP/ADQL session.
> 
> Cheers,
>     François, Marco and Dave

I have some mostly minor editorial points to make about this WD.
Apologies if some of these have been obsoleted by discussions
since it was posted.

Sec 2:

   "Case insensitiveness otherwise stated" - missing "unless"?

Sec 2.1.2:

   The syntax quoted here:

      "<Latin_letter> [{ <underscore> | {<Latin_letter> | <digit>} }]"

   seems to be missing at least one ellipsis, compared to that in
   the BNF in Appendix A.  By my reading the above syntax limits
   identifiers to two characters.  This text hasn't changed since
   ADQL v2.0 though, so if this is an error it's not new in this version.

   "to handle the case sensitiveness" - omit "the"?

Sec 2.3:

   Like Walter, I don't really undertand rand(x) - as far as I can see
   since it takes a seed it would be determinstic, which isn't
   very useful.  Am I missing something?

Sec 2.2.2:

   "may also support for the optional ILIKE ..." - omit "for"?

Sec 4.1:

    The formatted output says "The Demleitner et al. (2012) standard
    defines ...".  It would be better to name the standard in the 
    text, e.g. "The TAPRegExt standard (Demleitner et al. 2012)".
    The same comment applies to quite a few other places where this
    and other standards are cited.

Sec 4.2.1:

    "the already mention constrain that vectors should ..."
    - "the already mentioned constraint"?

Sec 4.2.10:

    "fist coordinate" -> "first coordinate"

Sec 4.2.18:

    There should be some discussion of permitted/recommended behaviour
    in the case that a non-empty string is submitted as the first
    argument of one of the geometry functions.

Sec 4.9:
    The section headings for the BIT_* functions omit the underscore
    in the function names.

    There's an unfinished sentence: "For example the query".

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/