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[REBOL] Re: Rebol values (continuing the discusion)

From: gabriele::colellachiara::com at: 18-Apr-2005 12:52

Hi Ladislav, On Monday, April 18, 2005, 6:39:24 AM, you wrote: LM> There are two ways to prove you wrong. The first one is "oversimplified" LM> and uses an implementation dependent (i.e. wrong) type of reasoning: I'd just point out that you are still referring to the numbers, not their representation. So, as long as only one "1" exists, there still can be many representation of that one "1". REBOL integers are not numbers, but representation of numbers. So we can discuss of the numbers themselves, as you do, or we can discuss about their representations, as I did. I don't think one discussion should be considered "more true" ;-) than the other. LM> There is not a complete counterpart of the above article written in an LM> "implementation dependent" style and there never will be such a LM> counterpart, because the implementation dependent terminology is LM> intrinsically inconsistent. A notion: "distinct but identical" LM> illustrates well the trouble one gets into when using it. This problem goes away as soon as you say "two distinct representations of the same value". In the same way as you can consider that two strings can be not the same string even if they are equal, because they are two distinct representations of the same string. I agree that an "abstract", i.e. implementation-independent, description of REBOL is useful; however, only Carl could really provide us with something like that. Our conclusions are only based on the implementation, and other implementations are based on the conclusions we made on RT's implementation. Also, there are a number of issues that are interesting and that an implementation-independent description does not cover, such as how much memory does the block [1 1 1] consume? . Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[g--santilli--tiscalinet--it]> -- REBOL Programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila --- SOON: http://www.rebol.it/