Re: P1788 Motion to amend Motion P1788/M0001.01_StandardizedNotation needs a second
Nathalie, William & all
---- Nathalie Revol <Nathalie.Revol@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> If voting "yes" lets open the possibility
> to modify the notation later if needed,
> then I vote yes.
I hopefully worded the motion and rationale to say that that is my intention. Mr Secretary, will you confirm that Nathalie's objection is added to the list of amendments to be made to the Notation Paper "in due course"?
This is how I'm thinking of the status of this paper:
The text of the standard itself will just use certain language. It won't say "sorry we couldn't stick to the what the notation paper wants". Au contraire, by the time the notation paper gets to be part of the standard, we shall have modified it, possibly more than once, to be a faithful description of the notation *we found to be necessary* in order to write the standard.
As a case in point, Nathalie's objection to the paper's interval relation notation does indeed seem well-founded. As it stands, xx = yy between intervals means "x=y for all x in xx and y in yy", i.e. it's true iff xx and yy are the same, single-point, interval. Well, most of us (when we are using the set paradigm, anyway) take xx = yy to mean equality as sets, so there's definitely something wrong with the paper's ideas here.
Moreover, anyone writing text of the standard covering interval relations probably must - and anyone writing a position paper on that topic certainly must - define alternative notations, for the purpose of describing the various meanings of = < and so on.
So the notation paper serves the standard, not the other way round. But IMHO we won't know for certain how best it should do so, till we have been writing standard-text for a while.
Therefore the Secretary's role in keeping a "looseleaf folder" of proposed future amendments to it, is important. OK William?
John P