WD-webarch-20031209: Assigning identifiers without knowing about representations

1.2.1 para 1

The first paragraph of this section is incomprehensible to me; I hope
it can be rewritten.

What does it mean to define an identifier without knowing what
representations are available?  Representations for what?  For the
identifier?  For the thing identified?  For something else entirely?
In general, I would have thought that before assigning identifiers to
things it would normally be useful to know what one was identifying.
In programming languages, what one identifies with identifiers are
typically representations of things (representations of integers,
representations of character strings, etc.); in that context, it seems
nonsensical to say without qualification (as is done here) that
identifiers can be assigned without any knowledge about available
representations; it is only a knowledge of the available
representations and their characteristics that allows one to decide
intelligently what different things need to be distinguished and thus
what different things will need to be identified.

Received on Thursday, 4 March 2004 18:12:31 UTC