[cap-talk] "Composite", was "Same" key

[Charles Landau]

At 8:47 PM -0800 2/6/07, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>Can any of the KeyKOS crowd/community clarify what the KeyKOS
>literature meant by "object"?

At 4:52 PM -0800 2/5/07, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>Charlie, you're the outlier here. AFAIK, you're the only one of us 
>that has consistently advocated the descriptive stance generally 
>associated with the other's camp

community

>. Perhaps further explanation of your perspective might help bridge 
>these perspective?

I'm not sure which view you're ascribing to me. Here's what I know.

- I don't think we had a term for "the thing that a capability refers 
to, such that different capabilities refer to different things". Here 
I'll call that an "atomic object".

- In KeyKOS we used "object" to mean "a group of one or more related 
atomic objects". At the time I wasn't aware of any other term for 
this concept. I'm not even sure if object-oriented programming had 
yet been invented back then. I was aware that the meaning of the term 
"object" depended on context, just as a "composite" depends on which 
atomic objects you choose to group together.

- I'm not wedded to this terminology, and will happily adopt whatever 
we can agree on here.

At 1:26 AM +0000 2/11/07, David Hopwood wrote:
>"composite" suggests *more than one* object, i.e. that a single object is
>    not a composite. This is not what we want: a single object should be just a
>    special case (where there is one facet and no hidden objects).

Yes, and this seems to me to be an advantage of speaking of "atomic 
object", "composite object" (or simply "composite"), and using 
"object" to include both.

>OTOH,  it's quite possible that someone will come up with other objections to
>"abstraction".

I happen to think that "abstraction" is too broad. I can mean a lot 
of things that are not objects.

>The particular choice of terms is, IMHO, far less important than the principle
>that the same term should not be used to refer to several distinct concepts in
>the same subject domain. That's why I object

pun intended?

>so strongly to the suggestions to
>use "object" for *both* of the concepts that MarkM's thesis calls 
>"objects" and
>"composites".

So may I humbly suggest that until we come to agreement, we at least 
use the term "atomic object" for the concept that MarkM's thesis 
calls "object"?