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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry® Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9-12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconf _______________________________________________ open-axiom-devel mailing list open-axiom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/open-axiom-devel
