On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 20:55:39 -0400, "Beman Dawes" <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
That's the Euclid algorithm of the type system! :-)
Thanks for the kind words!
They were due :-) Award for merit. (Just to clarify why I'm so enthusiast: we have all kinds of marvelous solutions here in boost, so why am I impressed by such a "simple" thing? Well, it's my belief that complex infrastructures are often result of education; simplicity is the result of genius --this is IMHO illustrative: looks like Gauss was a little rogue when he was in primary school, so the teacher, to keep him quiet for, supposedly, a long while, assigned him the task to sum up all integers from 1 to 100: he took the pen, observed that if you take the last and the first number and sum them you get 101, and the same goes if you move inwards by taking them in pairs (2+99, 3+98, etc.) --since there were obviously 50 pairs he immediately submitted the result: 50*101=5050. That's genius :-))
About the name, isn't "identifier" meant as "something which gives an identity" rather than as "C++ grammar identifier"?
Yes. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on third normal form at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_normal_form
In the example, I call "part number" an identifier. It is a number assigned to parts to uniquely identify them. It is common for an identifier to serve no other purpose and its value be immaterial. So it is pretty close to what the database folks call a key. But the value of keys is often material, as in the manufacturer table in the Wikipedia article.
Yeah, pretty clear. I wouldn't like this to shift into the classical Parkinson's bicycle shed, so I'll just have a short try: "identifier" is IMHO a good name except for the fact that it is immediately associated by C++ programmers with its grammar meaning, as Jeff noticed. The term I've most frequently heard for the database-related concept is "id", which is of course short for "identifier" but doesn't have the drawback above. OTOH it's probably a bit too short for library usage. Alternatively, I can see "newtype", "strong_type", "strong_typed" or "identified"(!?). Given that the context of usage is a derived class definition I have a slight preference for the first and the third one, though I don't object to the current name either. Hope this makes sense :-s -- [ Gennaro Prota, C++ developer for hire ]