Re: defining the semantics of lists

On 6/10/2020 5:34 PM, Frans Knibbe wrote:
> I am afraid that for geographical data (that's my background) a solution 
> with explicit length properties might not work. That's because the 
> distance between two locations may not be known or can not unambiguously 
> be determined. The earth's surface is not smooth and constantly 
> changing, that complicates matters.

Heh, heh!  I chose not to get into whether or not the triangle is to be 
in Euclidean space or not.  Talk about potential data explosion!  And 
notice that these possibilities don't have anything to do with the 
list-ness of the thing.

The style of modeling something is not a one-time thing that has only 
one possible way, at least not for something complicated.  I like to 
call these modeling patterns "idioms".  One can usually move details out 
of the model and into the software that interprets it, if the software 
understands the idiom.  But then you can't share those graphs except 
with others whose software understands the idiom.

Personally, before any new list constructs get standardized, I would 
like a lot more modeling (such as my example) to get done.  Once a lot 
of people get solid on that - i.e., have wrestled with it in detail - 
would it makes sense to me for shortcuts to get evolved to a standard.

TomP

Received on Wednesday, 10 June 2020 22:12:19 UTC