RE: Nate's objections to Motion 42
> > are in deep doodoo. Unfortunately I'm not convinced yet that Nate's
> > EIN is a conflict-free solution.
>
> Can you demonstrate or give examples of what you perceive are the conflicts?
> That would be helpful.
I know. I tried a few weeks ago to collect all mail relevant to EIN,
but it was too much to get a solid grip on the issue. John Pryce's
scheme of Motion 42 looks solid with respect to arithmetic functions,
which are the primary focus here. Attempts to support NAOs (the rest)
properly (with respect to decorations) have led to difficulties, as
the proper way to handle them seems to depend on the usage, so that
no one rule will suffice, and we must shift the responsibility to the
programmer. We thought that we could handle at least the relatively
common piecewise function definitions, but you uncovered a glitch there.
> If an implementation throws exceptions, a user will always be alerted
> as soon as the invalid construction is encountered, regardless what
> the decoration scheme is. So it's a moot point.
Not it's not: we want to allow the two kinds of Empty to have different
propagation rules, so that ILL will not be lost, but EMP could under
certain circumstances be absorbed. In the absence of exceptions this
should allow validity tests to be deferred longer.
Michel.
---Sent: 2013-02-12 00:04:16 UTC