In preparing for this IEEE talk I'm delivering on Nov 4 (USA election night) @ Armory, venue for this play I'm involved with, I'm looking at "namespaces" and "dot notation" as integral concepts within contemporary philosophy (where I have much background).
For example, early in the 1900s, the academic community was in much ferment over this idea of a "fourth dimension", with many fringe elements, esoteric think tanks etc., entering the fray. Linda D. Henderson did a good book on this, spun as art history, includes characters such as Claude Bragdon, P.D. Ouspensky among others. Roll the tape forward, and we have two different, yet well established namespaces wherein a "fourth dimension" occurs, one associated with Minkowski, later Einstein, another associated with sphere packing, e.g. (0,1,0,0,0,0) would be the center of a sphere, with (1,0,0,0,0,0) a neighboring sphere in n-dimensional space, the n relating to n == len(coord_tuple) being a true statement. So, using dot notation, we might write einstein.4d to signify the relativistic imaginary time literature championed in our time by Stephen Hawking, and exyz.4d to signify a fourth dimension per extended Euclideanism, well explained in that book by Sloane and J.H. Conway, published by Springer-Verlag (the exact title escapes me at the moment). Of course given the content of the IEEE talk (the play), I'll be adding yet another namespace into the mix, talking about fuller.4d, maybe changing exyz.4d to Coxeter.4d for this audience, for arcane historical reasons. The names we give namespaces is itself part of the namespace e.g. 'import math as toolbox' (except at my grunch.net/synergetics which is like an old museum exhibit by this time, and through which many people find me). or whatever. For purposes of discussion, and apropos edu-sig, you could look at all of the above as branching off 'import this' and wanting to explain *exactly why* Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those! Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
