signature terminology (editorial BLD issue)

Chris Welty <cawelty@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> Jeez, I'm sure glad I didn't have Michael for a professor.

I'll avoid making any comments about my time having Chris as a teacher
(he was a grad student, not a prof), since I dropped the class after a
couple of weeks.  :-)

> The differences are pretty simple, though:
> 
> A signature has a name and a set of expressions.
> A signature name is just a symbol used to reference the set of expressions.
> A signature expression is the standard sort of thing you might think of as a 
> signature

Right -- that's the part that bugs me.  ("Okay, here we have apples and
oranges and bananas.  Let's call apples, "bananas".  Now, hand me a
banana.")

Here are names that match my intuition:

     (i) => bool                     a signature 
     { (i i) => i, (i) => bool }     a signature set
     MySig                           a signature set name
     MySig{(i i) => i, (i) => bool}  a signature block ?
                                     (a signture set with its name)

A "signature block" assigns the name to the set and has a "return value"
of being the set, right? Is it worthwhile combine them?  How about just
having assignment, and using the name, later....

    MySig = {(i i) => i, (i) => bool}    a name assignment
                                        

My problem with "expression" is that it's usually a general term for any
linguistic construct.  Those things above are all linguistic expressions
in the signature language, so they all seem like "signature
expressions".   Maybe some of you can keep track of when a banana is a
banana and when it's an apple, but that's more work than I want to do
unless it's really needed.  

     -- Sandro

Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2007 18:05:52 UTC