in any case, try to be equal as much as possible! So I support Bill's suggestion and strongly recommend
"machineSorted?" to tell the user what is really going on. Am Mittwoch, 16. September 2009 schrieb Bill Page: > I've been bugged a little lately by a minor issue of nomenclature. > Both FriCAS and OpenAxiom have implemented a distinction between some > "mathematical" or "natural" ordering and equality of the members of a > domain - which might not always be defined or may be defined in > different ways, versus the "machine" ordering of the elements which is > always defined (perhaps even between members of different domains) and > is constant at least within a given a given session. The machine order > is not "natural" in the sense that it does not depend on any > consistent mathematical semantics, but rather could be implemented > for example by the ordering of the machine memory address of objects. > Such an ordering might change each time you restart the interpreter or > if you run the program on different machines. (Does this strategy work > if memory garbage collection is allowed to move objects in memory?) Or > with a little more work the "machine" ordering might be defined in a > "lexical" or syntactic manner in which case the ordering will not > depend on the details of the representation. In any case the machine > ordering is important for the efficiency and effectiveness of some > algorithms. > > The problem is that FriCAS and OpenAxiom have choosen different names > for the machine ordering. In FriCAS it is called "smaller?". > smaller?(alpha,beta) evaluates to true if the value of alpha comes > before the value of beta in the machine ordering. OpenAxiom calls the > same thing "before?". The problem is that the English root word > "smaller" has the connotation of size rather than order. But even the > OpenAxiom name seems vague and a little awkward to read. > > I would like to propose that both FriCAS and OpenAxiom change and > adopt a common standard name that makes better sense (at least in > English :-) How about "sorted"? For example > > if sorted?(alpha,beta) then ... > > This seems easy to read for me. Or if you want a more specific name maybe > > if machineSorted?(alpha,beta) then ... > > Ideas? Opinions? > > Regards, > Bill Page. > > -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen Johannes Grabmeier Prof. Dr. Johannes Grabmeier Köckstr. 1, D-94469-Deggendorf Tel.-pv. +49-(0)-991-2979-584, Tel.-mob. 0171-550-3789 Tel.-d +49-(0)-991-3615-141, Sekr. -154 Fax-p: +49-(0)-1803-5518-17745 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
