Re: Entity and Identity

On Sep 27, 7:34 pm, Clifford Heath <no.s..._at_please.net> wrote:
> Walter Mitty wrote:
> > I intended no pugnacity in my response.
>
> No, and I'm sorry I left that inference. I was referring
> to earlier messages in the thread, where anyone who even
> mentions the word "object" gets jumped on.
>
> My comment about not reading clearly was because I wrote
> to draw the very same distinction you reinforced. The fact
> that o-o programmers don't use mathematically pure notions
> doesn't appear to stop them producing functional systems, and
> it doesn't mean that all the concepts of object orientation
> are useless and wrong, which seems to be the mood here.
>
> > For a variety of reasons, I prefer the word "representation"  to
> > "instantiation".  And, in the cases you outlined, what we have is not
> > multiple representations of the same tuple, but multiple copies of the same
> > representation.  It's inherent in data that data can be copied.  A lot of
> > (real world) objects cannot be copied.  Managing data in such a way that the
> > multiple copies of the same representation of a tuple are bound together in
> > some fashion that relates to ACID is not a pretense, by any stretch of the
> > imagination.
>
> Well, that's a fair clarification. By "pretense", I mean
> that we can pretend that the object is not even being copied.
> That pretense is not possible with almost any o-o system,
> which gives the lie to Brian's assertion that location is
> part of state. In other words, I wrote to support your side
> of the argument.

You are misrepresenting what I wrote. I did not assert that location is part of state. I said that a difference in location constitutes a difference in state. I said that because an object that can have state can only have one state at a time and because that state can only occupy one location at a time. It therefore follows that if there is more than one location occupied at a given time, then there is more than one object at that time.

Since I clarified my position in a later post, I have to wonder what you sought to gain by misrepresenting what I wrote. But then again, I should give you the benefit of the doubt: maybe you didn't read the clarification. I hope that's it. Willful misrepresentation is the hallmark of sleazy politicians and a biased media that seek to further their own agenda by throwing others under the bus--even their own grandmother.

> --
> Clifford Heath, Data Constellation,http://dataconstellation.com
> Agile Information Management and Design
Received on Mon Sep 28 2009 - 05:48:26 CEST