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

[David Hopwood]

Sandro Magi wrote:
> Charles Landau wrote:
>>At 6:15 PM +0000 2/14/07, David Hopwood wrote:
>>
>>>We seem to be agreed
>>>on what the concepts are, so it's just a matter of deciding between:
>>>
>>>1. Object          Composite
>>>2. Object          Abstraction
>>>3. Atomic object   Object
>>
>>No, I think the choices are:
>>
>>               1                          >1                 >=1
>>1 (MarkM)   Object                   Composite           ?
>>2 (Hopwood) Object or Abstraction    Abstraction         Abstraction
>>3 (Landau)  Atomic object            Composite object    Object
> 
> Or just Atom, Composite, Object.

I don't much like having three distinct terms. Using the row 2 terminology:
whether an abstraction has one object, or more than one object, is often
an implementation detail. I don't know why we would want to emphasize
this distinction by using unrelated words for ">1" and ">=1", as opposed
to saying "multi-object abstraction" in the few cases where we want to
*exclude* single-object abstractions.

> "Atom" is well-known as being singular and indivisible.

It's also well-established in a programming language context to mean the
atomic symbol values of Lisp- and Prolog-derived languages. In any such
language that is also an object-capability language, this would be an
unnecessary clash.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood at blueyonder.co.uk>