Re: theory and practice: ying and yang

From: Alexandr Savinov <savinov_at_host.com>
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 11:36:09 +0200
Message-ID: <429d8197$1@news.fhg.de>

Tony Andrews schrieb:
> Alexandr Savinov wrote:
>

>>One major problem of declarative approach is that sets do not exist in
>>reality.

>
>
> What do you mean by that? Of course they do! It is even an everyday
> term: chess set, tea set, geometry set. And we think in sets all the
> time: "my friends", "the population of the UK", "pack of cards", ...
>
> How can you possibly say that sets "do not exist in reality"?

I mean that we cannot *represent* sets in such a way that they remain sets. We can think of a number of things as a set but we are not able to store or pass them. We always need some underlying *representation* mechanism like arrays.

Sets do not exist in reality because elements cannot exist in vacuum like in set theory. Elements of a set *must* have some coordinates (offsets, positions etc.) in order to be qualified as (separate) elements. Thus when we say we have a set we normally mean we have some representation of them (but we do not care how concretely it is organized, particularly, we do not care its order).

-- 
alex
http://conceptoriented.com

Received on Wed Jun 01 2005 - 04:36:09 CDT