Robert O. Gould wrote: >One polyhedron, two polyhedra, what's a polyhedrae when it's at home?
Oh dear, I hope you are not going to start another "cognoscenti" debate Bob. I don't use "polyhedron" in crystallography because by definition a crystal lattice does not contain a single polyhedron, but various types of polyhedra. I use "polyhedrae" to mean the family of all such polyhedra. I wanted to make the specific point that although it may be easy to construct individual polyhedra, such as a network of SiO4, it is useful to automatically construct all types of polyhedra in an arbitrary structure. If we were to insist on strict declension rules, we would still be writing Latin, rather than various flavours (flavors?) of English. Alan. _____________________________________________________________ Dr Alan Hewat, ILL Grenoble, FRANCE<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>fax+33.476.20.76.48 +33.476.20.72.13 (.26 Mme Guillermet) http://www.ill.fr/dif/AlanHewat.htm _____________________________________________________________
