[Bug 27001] Terminology: identity

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=27001

Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> changed:

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--- Comment #5 from Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> ---
A lot of the rhetoric around identity has of course come from implementation of
programming languages - in C and C++ style languages identity is usually
implemented as "machine address" - but atomic values such as an integer or
character or floating-point number don't have a machine address, you can't
write 6 to the location where 42 is defined since there is no such location:
indirection is not generally used to access atomic values in such languages.

The pragmatic use for identity becomes, "identity is the property that lets you
distinguish two or more things efficiently, and gives you a handle to a thing
that may change over time". That does not define identity, of course, except
through its properties.

This is not the same usage as mathematical identity, but is very common in
programming language design and specification. Not all languages use the term
"identity" for this concept, however. Perhaps we should rather say haecceity,
"this-one-ness".

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Received on Thursday, 9 October 2014 23:30:24 UTC