Re: The ultimate luxury ?

From: Jesse F. Hughes (jesse_at_phiwumbda.org)
Date: 08/03/04 

Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:51:01 +0200

jmfbahciv@aol.com writes:

> In article <87u0vlk7st.fsf@phiwumbda.org>,
> jesse@phiwumbda.org (Jesse F. Hughes) wrote:
>> .. As far as I
>>can see, there's no reason to have a special term "sort" meaning "sort
>>alphabetically or numerically" and use a distinct term "collate" for
>>all other arrangements of data according to some order on a field of
>>the data. The distinction isn't particularly useful to me.
>
> I noticed and I've been thinking about this. I fear it's a side
> effect of having too much memory, too much disk storage and CPUs
> that are too fast. There isn't much advantage, ala wallclock
> time, to sort then process data records.

None of those are relevant to my background, which is only about
theoretical CS largely unencumbered with worries like feasibility.
Sometimes, a theorist is interested in modeling a problem without
considering time or space constraints.

Anyway, I don't do that stuff now either.

>>Depends, I guess, on what biz you mean. I personally don't care much
>>about what terms programmers in the field use. I care much more what
>>terms researchers use. I believe FOLDOC is a better reference for
>>computer science theorists and researchers than for programmers in the
>>business world.
>
> Possibly, but it's an incomplete compendium.

No doubt.

> Note that the computer biz has had a history of changing extremely
> fast over the last 50 years. IOW, old knowledge that has been lost
> will have to be figured out again.

Sometimes. Sadly so. Other times, the old distinctions were dropped
with good reason. In this case, I still don't get the importance of
the distinction you're keen on drawing.

>>
>>In any case, if the programmers that created my newsclient count as
>>"in the biz", then they use the term sort as I do. But it's an open
>>source project largely maintained by a bunch of academics (I think),
>>so that's probably not a fair test.
>
> I'm worried about people taught in this manner who get a job
> where a piece of the spec they're handed say "sort". Or these
> people write a spec that says sort when they really mean another
> type of ordering.

Personally, I doubt that the problem arises much in the real world.
Context will probably either make clear the relevant order or make
clear that it isn't clear.

Call me a stupid optimist. 

-- 
Jesse F. Hughes
"You shouldn't hate Mother Mathematics."
                          -- James S. Harris

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