Re: Operationalize orthogonality

By describing integers using booleans. Once you have integers described, you can (assuming you've defined the > operator on them) explicitly maintain order, wherever it's necessary to have order.

We start from ground zero (booleans, relations, type generator). From ground zero, we can get to the basement (booleans, relations, type generator, integers). From the basement, we can clamber to the ground floor (booleans, relations, type generator, integers, characters). This is the point where things might start to get recognisable as a usable system, assuming generous helpings of syntactic sugar.

It isn't a cop-out, but I did use in an earlier post the phrase "frightening degree of circumlocution". Hopefully you can now see just how frightening. But it is doable.

This is very good news, because if we can reason about ground zero, then everything above it is on a very sound foundation. If we start building at the ground floor with no foundations or without thinking about the foundations, then sooner or later our reasoning about how the building is hanging together won't work anymore leading to unpredictable or difficult results trying to build additional floors (or heaven help us, an extension) or even collapse of the building. Received on Wed May 31 2006 - 01:24:46 CEST