Re: Sets and Lists, again

>> I mentioned that in a list of presidents, Grover Cleveland would appear once, but in a list of presidencies, he would appear twice. <<

We should not model presidents, but "The Presidency" by perople and terms, so the n-th president of US has the value of Mr. X. And the order is important -- so you can blame the previous guy for a disaster that happened in your term.

>> So, if you have sets, why do you need lists? <<

Ever try to write a parser in SQL instead of LISP? The LISP/list model is the best way to lingustics, semantic networks, etc. Those tools do STRUCTURE and not DATA.

One of my Pascal programming exervcises was based ont he combinartory operators given in Raymond Smulliyan's book "To Mock a Mocking Bird" and part of the problem was to pick a method. Pascal list processing was 1000 times better than try to process the expression as strings ! Received on Fri May 19 2006 - 19:15:01 CDT