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Re: Language design values (Re: message primitive)


"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

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