[Developers] "Must ask for a value when you use a comparison operator"

[William Pietri]

Tim Sturge wrote:
> Hi William,
>
> This is a very good question. The restriction is indeed artificial and 
> I agree it would be good to remove it. If you're not interested in the 
> value, there's no reason for MQL to require you to ask about it.
>
> It would be more difficult to return the value automatically. [...] 
> asking for:
>
> [{ "/common/topic/alias~=": "Bradbury", "id": null, "type": 
> "/film/film_location", "/common/topic/alias": null }]
>
> results in: [...]
>
> This is a case where inferring "/common/topic/alias": null from 
> "/common/topic/alias~=": "Bradbury" would break the query, whereas if 
> MQL does not return the value there is no problem to solve.

Thanks, that's good to know.

Personally I'd also prefer the leave-it-out approach, but if there are 
strong partisans for the must-return-something approach, then you could 
do something that parallels the behavior of

    "*":null

where "null" really means "null" or "[]" depending on context.


Particular solution aside, do you want people to put MQL language 
suggestions like this in with the tickets?

    http://www.freebase.com/view/filter?id=/freebase/software_ticket

Or is mentioning things here sufficient?



Thanks,

William