On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, Bill Page wrote: | | On 12/6/07, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: | > | > On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, Bill Page wrote: | > | > | If you wish can treat the sequence of symbols: | > | | > | ( x ( x x ( x ( x ) ) x ) ) | > | | > | as encoding a kind of "curve" is some abstract differential geometry. | > | Then each '(' and ')' token has some associated unit "curvature" or | > | something like that. But I do not see any advantage to this point of | > | view. | > | > Are the '(' and ')' needed? | | ??? Yes of course!
Sorry, why `of course!' There is nothing obvious there. | | > And in case they are needed, why should they be thought of as | > curvature, as opposed to mere boundary markers? | > | | Perhaps they can be thought of as boundary markers. Which they are from the Spad parser/definition point of view. | I was talking | about a geometric visual analogy for the structuring of program code, | but you apparently want to take a more abstract topological view. I'm just suspicious of analogy. | Since topology logically precedes the the usual notion of geometry | perhaps in this case the notion of dimension is not of much | importance. It is not clear what advantage this might have. Could you | explain? The advantage of pretending that the Spad language is 2-dimensional when that has not been established by logical inference? Intellectual honesty. -- Gaby ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ open-axiom-devel mailing list open-axiom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/open-axiom-devel