On Wed, 05 Jul 2000, Christopher Browne wrote:
> > I disagree. "Prices" are NOT in the same unit space as countable items.
> > To FORCE them there places unreasonable constraints on the way we
> > represent and handle them.
>
> I agree with you on this; "Prices" are different particularly since they
> have not one, but _TWO_ commodities associated with them.
That's what I meant by "unit space".
> > As I have said before, the design should not depend upon the
> > representation.
>
> On the other hand, if there turns out to be a single representation
> > Therefore, please humor me and consider that they are totally
> > different. If, after specifying ALL the functionality, we find that
> > we can merge them into a common type, that would affect only the
> > implementation details.
>
> Indeed. I agree that "prices" will be quite different from "quantities;"
> I expect that there will be persistent difference between them.
>
> The assumption that they Must Be The Same is as bad an idea as the
> assumption that they Must Be Different.
No. The safe assumption is that they are different. Period. Modern compilers
all provide a mechanism to override that assumption and equate two types that
are
> I rather think that we should look at both, see what properties they
> _need_ to have, and determine what common/differing properties fall out
> of that. Intuition suggests to me that they will be somewhat different,
> but we'll see...
I think that we are saying the same thing. You and I are both of the
(learned) opinion that they will ultimately be different. However, we
acknowledge that, if it works better, we would consider folding them into one
unified structure.
Now, if we can just get folks to focus on the PROPERTIES and OPERATIONS
rather than the DETAILS of the representation. ...
BTW, I like your term "commodity" for these things (money, shares of stock,
kernels of corn, etc.) that we count. Finding terms that do not carry
emotional baggage is difficult. For example, when there was discussion of
"rationals", some people assumed that we would carry a numerator and a
denominator. Others, myself included, assumed only that the integer numerator
did not represent a multiple of unity (in the units of the commodity).
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