UMLR — issue10087 and association-like notation

No problem with the issue itself or the proposed resolution. I’m just wondering about the principle of the “association-like notation”.

My concerns:

The specification says that “An attribute may also be shown using association notation”. Nevertheless, defining an attribute or using an association as described in figure 7.31 is not the same thing. The definition of one attribute generates only one property while the definition of a binary association generates two properties plus a classifier for the association itself.

If it’s only a matter of notation, how to distinguish in a diagram between:

a) an attribute with an association-like notation

and

b) a “true” association?

Yves