Incongruent hash (really: using #, for building Points)

Patrick Logan patrickl at servio.gemstone.com
Fri Feb 13 19:35:00 UTC 1998


>>>>> "Mike" == Mike Klein <mike at twinsun.com> writes:

    >> Wait a minute H-M! First, this is a violation of the semantics
    >> of "," meaning concatenation (as in strings). I tried to use
    >> "+" for string concatenation a number of years ago and was
    >> convinced (at the time) by Peter Deutsch that this was very
    >> poor style.

    Mike> I'm curious what his argument went like.  Since selectors
    Mike> are all in a "global" symbol table, polysemous selectors
    Mike> (homographs) seem inevitable.  Is it an ideal to strive for
    Mike> that all message names have a single meaning?

    Mike> The + operator on SequenceableCollections is associative;
    Mike> empty collections are left & right identity elements; too
    Mike> bad there are no inverses.  Hmm, anti-characters...
    Mike> ('pasta' + 'antipasta' ) = ''

They are not commutative, though, of course.

To me the , selector reads "followed by" where the + selector reads "sum".

And the @ selector read "at" which makes sense to me for Point...

1 @ 2    ...reads "a point is an X value at a Y value, e.g. one at two".

-- 
Patrick Logan                 mailto:patrickl at gemstone.com
Voice 503-533-3365            Fax   503-629-8556
Gemstone Systems, Inc         http://www.gemstone.com





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