I agree with Waldek.

For "zero? x" the biggest problem probably is that it should be 
consistent with "x=0". Unfortunately, that can only be claimed through 
documentation and not through formal statements that the compiler can 
handle.

It would be really really a nice extension of the language if in the 
specification of a category, also axioms (like for example 
commutativity) could be given as logical formulae (not by names of 
categories).

empty?(list) is another candidate in this series of functions.

Ralf



On 10/22/2008 10:49 PM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> Bill Page wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Martin Rubey wrote:
>>> ...
>>>    div2exquo  : F -> F
>>>    div2exquo f ==
>>> --      one?(d := denom f) => f
>>>      ((d := denom f) = 1) => f
>>>      opex(smp2exquo numer f, smp2exquo d)
>>>
>>> (by the way, I think we should replace (* = 1) by one?(*) again)
>>>
>> Perhaps it needs more discussion, but I agree that removing the code
>> 'one? ...' and 'zero? ...' throughout the library source was probably
>> a mistake. I recall some discussions with Tim about this in the very
>> early days of the open source project.
>>
>> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2003-07/msg00103.html
>>
>> My point of view was that it introduces a deep and unnecessary
>> dependency. Tim suggested that this was an "optimization" introduced
>> by NAG:
>>
>> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2003-07/msg00107.html
>>
> 
> ATM I have no strong opinion about 'one? ...' and 'zero? ...'.
> However, they have really nothing to do with CCL -- they are Spad
> functions which for some domains may be given some special Lisp
> implementation.  Both are just special case of eqality.  'one? ...'
> and 'zero? ...' in principle may be slightly more efficient than
> general equality because frequently 0 and 1 have very special
> representation.  Also, 0 and 1 sometimes are special cases for
> equality, so we may get deeper recursion (and there is some
> risk of infinite loops).  OTOH using just equality mathematically
> looks cleaner.
> 
> 

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