John Maddock wrote:
I'm not convinced, yet. Maybe I'm having difficulties to fully understand you. Can you perhaps try to clarify what makes "abstract" unsuitable in your opinion?
Well in C++ at least abstract has a specific meaning,
Excuse my blunt question: did you read the part of my previous post about the analogy with abstract classes? ( In fact, I was very much looking forward to read your comments on this :-) ).
and from Webster's we get:
"Considered apart from concrete existence: an abstract concept. "
A category for one possibilty of a mutually exclusive group of variations (with a similar /abstract concept/, for that matter) /is/ apart from /concrete existence/, isn't it?
What we have here in this case is a union of several concrete concepts, it's more like a wildcard really: "match a or b or c".
The reason to have a term for it at all is /not/ to document the match -- it's to document the synthesis behaviour. I've nothing against changing that term, however, "abstract" still cuts it best and even the definition from Webster's seems to fit nicely IMO. Btw. a "named wildcard that represents a category of variations with a similar (abstract) concept" matches the above defintion as well, doesn't it? I still don't get what's wrong with the "abstract" term, I guess... Sorry, Tobias