Re: Junction Values

[Rod Adams]

Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 12:42:31PM -0600, Rod Adams wrote:
 

No, but nor does it have a concept quite like a variable. 

     

Which significantly weakens the "mapping naturally to human linguistic 
structures" argument, IMO.
   

Why exactly?  It's just the variable-nature of variables that isn't
exactly expressed linguistically, otherwise variables are just nouns
really.
 

And nouns either refer to single item, or a group of items as a whole. 
Not one item that behaves like a chameleon.

When you say "The French", you are referring to the entire group of 
people that associate themselves with the country of France. Not all the 
people of France juxtaposed into one entity. If you want that, you say 
"A Frenchmen" or "One of the French", but even then you are referring to 
a single person, who happens to part of the group "The French". This 
last is a pure Set membership question. The same "The French" can be 
used as : "The French are invading!!". With a junction, you can build 
something that says "any group of people from France", "one person from 
France", "everyone from France", and even "not from France", but none of 
them embody the concept that we think of as "The French".

If you were to have an embodiment of "The French" (as I proposed way 
back in "Sets vs Junctions"), it is fairly easy to then create all of 
the above junctions. Via the introspection that Junctions are being 
defined with, it's possible to get that back out, but not smoothly.

So, linguistically, a noun is either a specific entity, or a group of 
things, taken as a whole.
As Damian so emphatically stated earlier in this long and twisting 
thread, a Junction is not a group of things, lopped together. It is one 
single thing, that has several different values at once. In addition, it 
also has a boolean function (any/all/one/none), declaring how all these 
values relate when evaluated. The closest linguistic parallel to this 
I've see is the double entendre, which doesn't even come close.

Sets and Junctions are two different things. They are related, but quite 
different, and should not be confused.

Junctions are equivalent to the English sentence "Get eggs, bacon, and
toast from the store".  (In Perl, that'd be something like C<<
$store->get("eggs" & "bacon" & "toast") >>.) 

Or just have C< get() >  take a list, and it's:
$store->get(<<eggs bacon toast>>); # is that the latest use of <<>>?
   

It's just a bit of
orthogonality that allows you to give "eggs, bacon, and toast" a name
and use it later.
shopping list = <<eggs bacon toast>>;
gives them a name you can use later, as well.
   

Except that you've introduced a definite ordering where one isn't
needed.
 

Yes, well, people don't get to use that argument on me after repeatedly 
saying that sets could be easily stored in arrays and/or hashes. I don't 
remember if you, personally said it, but it felt like a consensus vote 
from over here. One I don't really disagree with.

Not to mention the definite ordering only matters if you process it in a 
way that it does.

In attempts to better explain:
   $store->get("eggs" & "bacon" & "toast");
   $store->get(<<eggs bacon toast>>);
say two radically different things. The first statement says: "Go to the 
store and get Eggs. Go to the store and get Bacon. Go to the store and 
get Toast. Save the results of each trip separately, and then when 
someone asks how your trip (not trips) to the store went, you then see 
if all the results are the same."

The second statement says: "Go to the store once. You have the following 
shopping list: Eggs, Bacon, Toast. Was your trip successful?"

-- Rod Adams