After reading your blog post on the 3Literati blog about X++, I definitely understand the colors part. The slash indicates that blue and red are part of the same element. A slash, in other words, sort of combines two elements into one.

A dash, on the other hand, indicates that the second element is a child of the first one, yet they are still all grouped into one element.

Obviously, if the attributes are both two separate elements, then they are unrelated and only connected by their higher characteristic. I think I get that. I also think I get the pipes part. For example, if I wanted to connect these three attributes:

wild as a horse
untamed like the Atlantic ocean
captain controlling his ship

<wild as a horse/|untamed like the Atlantic ocean - "captain controlling his ship"|>

Is this correct? The pipes make it so that "captain controlling his ship" is specifically a child attribute of "untamed like the Atlantic ocean", and not of "wild as a horse". Correct?

Just one last thing. When I write child attributes (-) and connected attributes (/), how do I enclose the second attribute? In quotes "captain controlling his ship"? or in the normal element syntax? <captain controlling his ship>. Hope you get what I mean.

eruheran

Looks like you got it!

As for your question about quotes.

You don't really need to wrap them at all, because they are already delimited by the dash and the right hand angle bracket. Quotes for delimiting phrases is being deprecated because they will have a special meaning in ECSS++.

Yay, something that becomes simplified in X++! And I love the word deprecated, so that's great! OK, so you don't have to wrap it in anything. Got it. I'll fix all of the places I used quotes.

I can see the potential for X++, even though I've only figured out a few things. The 'slash and dash' features especially have been very useful to me in communicating things One last question: do quotes have a new meaning in X++ or could they be used as normal quotes (i.e. how we'd use them in writing)?

eruheran

In X++ they are used to escape things that would otherwise have had a reserved meaning. So, if you are writing a phrase like this: a mountain rising tall - against a wave of lava, the dash would have a special meaning that would break the phrase. So you would wrap it in quotes like this: "a mountain rising tall - against a wave of lava", and then the dash doesn't have its regular meaning anymore, and can be used just like in English. That make sense?

So quotes would 'English-ify' all of the things that they are wrapped around? Thus allowing us to still use dashes, slashes, pipes, etc. in our X maps? Correct? Cool. I like that idea...especially the dashes, since I used to use those a lot before I found out about this newer stuff.

Also, one last question about this ^ character. Would this be used to sort of connect two unrelated things in an X? For example, if I wanted to make a characteristic named 'Revenge' and one named 'Resentment'. In XBasic these would have to be two separate characteristics but in X++ I could use the ^ to connect them like so: 'Revenge^Resentment'. Did I get that or does it have another meaning? This is just what I gathered from your post.

eruheran

Those are used for something along those lines, yes. Basically they are used to allow you to concatenate two pieces in the Tag. So you can have two or more Titles for one attribute, two or more labels, two or more aliases, etc. Like so:

1st level^king*ADD^ABSTRACT^lion watching his forest{}

I think we should split these last few posts into the X++ subforum.

Thanks for making a separate thread for this I'll look at your latest reply in the morning.

eruheran

So basically, the ^ works like joiner for unrelated things, allowing us to portray a broader scope in our attributes? (I had to look up the word concatenate...found it in an Excel user guide ). Anyways, I think I get the ^ sign. What else is there in X++?

eruheran

Not unrelated things: synonyms.

The idea is to show that these two things all apply to the attribute, like a slash in an element.

Lots.

So the ^ is only for levels higher than elements and it's to connect two synonyms to make the attribute cover a broader chunk of metaphors?

eruheran

The ^ is for the Tag, which is the part of an attribute that preceded the opening bracket. They can be used for the Tags of Elements.

And yes, that is it pretty much.