This is the mail archive of the
guile@sourceware.cygnus.com
mailing list for the Guile project.
Re: Language design values (Re: message primitive)
- To: "Reynolds, Gregg" <greynolds at datalogics dot com>
- Subject: Re: Language design values (Re: message primitive)
- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow at alum dot mit dot edu>
- Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 13:36:38 -0800
- CC: "'Daschbach, John L'" <John dot Daschbach at pnl dot gov>, guile at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- References: <51ED3F5356D8D011A0B1006097C3073401B170D4@martinique>
"Reynolds, Gregg" wrote:
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Daschbach, John L [mailto:John.Daschbach@pnl.gov]
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2000 2:32 PM
> ...
> > me what I think of as orthogonal. A purely orthogonal set of
> > functions would
> > mean that given any function you could not duplicate it's
> > functionality with any
> > combination of the remaining functions. 'car' and 'cdr' are
>
> Question: how can one express the notion that the members of the basis set
> themselves are maximally simple? Presumably one could define a basis set
> that includes semantically complex functions which could be expressed as a
> combination of a different basis set. I'm having trouble at the moment
> coming up with a realistic example, but suppose you had a "frobnicate"
> function that really means "first bevorpilate, then pibbelize", but the
> latter two are excluded from the language for some reason, or are always
> implicit in other primitives. Is there a term from mathematics that one
> could use to indicate a basis set has or has not been maximally decomposed?
>
In linear algebra one basis is as good as another. Obviously this is
not the case with programming languages. But the metaphor is getting
quite
a bit overextended here.
- Maciej