terminological obscurity

Donn Cave donn at drizzle.com
Sat May 22 13:53:07 EDT 2004


Quoth Arthur <ajsiegel at optonline.com>:
...
| I  think I am perfectly capable of making sense of the explanation
| that uses the unambigous words heterogenous and homogenous in the
| context of this discussion.  
|
| But the ambiguous word in the previous sentence, IMO, is
| "explanation".  Because in the end - I am repeating myself - I find,
| with emphasis given these words - a  tautolofgy parading as an
| explanation.

If repetition works for you, let's go back and give it the works.
You first announced this conclusion in a followup to Shalabh
Chaturvedi.  Here is the account of homogeneity in that post:

Chaturvedi:
  I believe it is conceptual homogeneity and not type homogeneity that 
  characterises the difference between lists and tuples. 

  Consider use of tuples such as (hostname, port) or (firstname, lastname, 
  middleinitial) or (x_coordinate, y_coordinate). In all cases you *know* 
  what the first element means, what the second element means etc. It is 
  usually not useful to find a value since the different values mean 
  different things. You might rather do this something like - if host_port[1] 
  == 80:... 

Can you quote _both paragraphs_ of the above and point out the
circularity in his explanation?

I don't know if homogeneity is the most useful term to get at the
distinction as I understand it, but evidently that's how Guido tried
to explain it, so that's where we start.  It can take some explaining.
We could try to think of better ways to approach it - maybe bring in
the notion of a tuple as a "product" of its elements - but the parties
to that discussion would have to 1) understand the distinction, and
2) not be satisfied with the way it's currently explained.  No sign
of anyone in that corner yet.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com



More information about the Python-list mailing list