Hi all, I've been thinking for a while about Darcs patch theory and how to connect it to standard mathematical concepts. I ended up with a new formal model which I've written up as a technical report:
http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jjacobson/patch-theory The main idea is to model patch effects as elements of inverse semigroups, which generalize the properties of partial injective functions. Inverse semigroups turn out to provide clean descriptions of concepts such as composition, inversion and sensibility. They also make a good framework for discussing and proving results about the commutation and merge operations. Additionally, they led me to a novel explanation of conflictors (well, a simplified version of them). I'm very interested to hear what other Darcs theorists and users think about all this. My paper was heavily influenced by the Camp formalization, so it would be great if we were eventually able to combine both approaches. Best, -Judah _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
