Re: A Normalization Question

> The string 'brown' in this context is just a much a single logical thing
> as the number 10 is. They are both just tokens to represent the colour
> we call "brown".

No, there is a distinction between the thing 'brown' and the reference implied by 10. Suppose we have things A (a person), B (a color), C (a street) and D (a string 'brown'). Then refs would be similar to A->D, B->D, C->D, etc. In most of my example, A->D, B->D and C->D have been show as 5. You are in effect suggesting that the D in refs A->D, B->D and C->D can be normalized, however they can't. They look as if they can be normalized because the starting point of the ref was implicit. No two refs were the same because they implied starting point was always different.

> Would you "normalise" the number 19 by looking at its decimal expansion
> as ("1","9") ? Or by its binary expansion as ("1","0","1","1") ?

One can represent a quantity at the logical level in words ('ten'), hex ('A'), decimal('10.0'), bits('1010'), etc and how these are stored at the hardware level is irrelevant. A human brain represents all of these without bits, bytes or integers. Received on Tue Jul 13 2004 - 19:28:12 CEST