Re: Eliminate duplicates in expansion?

On 05/23/2012 07:17 AM, Markus Lanthaler wrote:
> in a recent update to the test suite Dave changed the behavior of
> expansion to remove duplicates in sets. Is this what we wanna do?

Yes. It doesn't make sense for a set to contain a duplicate of the same
member (per the mathematical definition of a set):

"A set is a gathering together into a whole of definite, distinct
objects of our perception [Anschauung] and of our thought – which are
called elements of the set."

    -- Georg Cantor, Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre

The key phrase there being "distinct objects".

> So, e.g., "prop": [ 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3 ] will now get expanded to
> "prop": [ 1, 2, 3 ] (of course as @value objects). Is this what we
> wanna do? Or is this something we should do as part of framing resp.
> subject map generation?

I think all of the algorithms should clean sets... we could also take
the position that no cleaning should be done for performance reasons.
That's really the strongest counter-point I can see now - performance...
because multi-hundred-thousand-member sets are not going to be
performant for this algorithm.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm Website for Developers Launched
http://digitalbazaar.com/2012/02/22/new-payswarm-alpha/

Received on Thursday, 24 May 2012 01:02:57 UTC