From: Frank van Harmelen (Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl)
Date: 08/28/01
One of the arguments in favour of the "proper subclass" stance seemed to be that Java programmers think this way. They don't. On p.170 of "The Complete Java 2 Certification Study Guide" written by Simon Roberts, Philip Heller and Michael Ernest, it says: "In general, a class is considered to be a subclass of itself. That is, if classes A, B and C are defined so that C extends B, and B extends A, then the subclasses of A are A, B, C. The term 'strict subclass' is used to describe the subclasses excluding the class itself. So, the strict subclass of A are only B and C." So that pretty conclusively kills the argument that Java programmers want the proper subclass interpretation. They might want the acyclic interpretation, but (as argued in previous msg) this can be coherently combined with allowing non-proper subclasses. (saving RDF-S from at least one design flaw). (Pat, Ora, I'm simply trying to provide you with fodder for the RDF Core group here) Frank. ----
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