From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 08:48:40 +0800
To: cypherpunks@ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: Re: Orthogonal (fwd)
Message-ID: <199710270042.SAA01737@einstein.ssz.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



Forwarded message:

> Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1997 16:33:58 -0800
> From: Kent Crispin <kent@bywater.songbird.com>
> Subject: Re: Orthogonal

> The first context where I am aware of this use of the term orthogonal
> is from language design -- it was promoted by Niklaus Wirth and other
> purists, with languages like Pascal, Modula, CLU, and so on.  Larry
> Wall's "perl" language, with its slogan "there's more than one way to
> do it", is a direct revolt against the language purists.
> 
> The basic idea is that a computer language should have the minimum
> number of constructs necessary to span the intended application.  So
> for example, you don't provide hyperbolic trig functions, because the
> user can implement them using simpler math functions.  On the other
> hand, you do supply commonly used math functions that would otherwise
> require iterative algorithms.
> 
> I do believe the use of the term this way was inspired by the 
> notion of a 'basis' in a vector space -- a set of orthogonal
> vectors that span the space, ideally, unit vectors.

Can you better define the term 'basis'?

I can see the union 'build complicated things out of basic building blocks'
and the use of Occam's Razor (I'm as lazy as any other programmer) but fail
to see how this maps to anything relating to the concept of orthogonal.
Which clearly doesn't have any inherent minimalist cast.


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