Re: Key attributes with list values was Re: What are the differences ...KEY
Date: 25 Feb 2006 20:40:00 -0800
Message-ID: <1140928800.027615.223480_at_i39g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Brian Selzer wrote:
> What I'm trying to convey is that from one point of view, a list
> has identity, regardless of its contents.
I reject this point of view. The system I am building has values and variables only. There are no pointers, there are no addresses, and there is no concept of identity. There is only value.
This is not to say that the concept of identity is not consistent. It certainly is, and useful programming languages have been built on top of it. It is foundational to OOP. However, useful systems have been built without it as well; it is not a necessary concept.
I don't think identity is a concept with much useful life left in it. Identity only makes sense relative to some address space, and the world is shifting to distributed computing. There are those who think that we can shift to a global distributed address space, but I believe such efforts are doomed to failure.
Marshall Received on Sun Feb 26 2006 - 05:40:00 CET