Since I really like the idea of typed field values, and find Lee's arguments
rather clumsy themselves, i want to give an example where typing would be
needed:
Suppose you have a field named storable.publicationyear . Now the node can
*by definition* not know what type this field is, as all the storable
fields contain metadata which is processed by the clients.
Now suppose we agree on some search proposal or another. Suppose this
search proposal allows a further limitation on the results of the search
by using (a) search string(s) to match against the metadata.
Now suppose a client sends a searchstring "publicationyear > 1967"
which is supposed to narrow down the search results to those that
have a storable.publicationyear value greater than 1967. Now the node
_needs_ to know that the field storable.publicationyear contains a
numeric value to do a numeric comparison.
So that's why we _need_ typed fields.
CU,
Philipp
PS: Lee: about all of your text based protocols: most UDP-based
protocols that I've looked at are plain binary protocols.
We will needa UDP-based Freenet protocol in the long run,
and this should be a binary protocol too. So another point
for typed fields.
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