Github user cestella commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-metron/pull/404
Hey, thanks for the great addition @jjmeyer0!
A few things to note and some context.
Around validation, the initial stellar implementation purposefully ran
validation the way that it's implemented, but we can reconsider those things if
we want.
* The variables resolve to `null` to ensure that functions could handle
`null` without error. I understand that Java and most programming languages
would NPE on `1 < null`, but our data flowing through the topologies will be
sparse, so not all variables will be defined for every message. If a stellar
statement is applied to a message where the variable is not defined, I wanted
to ensure that it did not fail, but rather did an appropriate thing depending
on the operation.
* We do function resolution during validation to ensure people have not
made a syntactic error in their stellar statements when pushing configs to
zookeeper. We would rather fail fast here.
Around `==` for floating point numbers. The initial stellar implementation
intended to do an epsilon check on equals involving doubles (e.g. Math.abs(lhs
- rhs) < epsilon) as you almost never want strict equality in floating point
numbers.
What this does show is that we need more of a rigorous spec and more time
spent on documenting the design of Stellar.
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