RE: Language design values (Re: message primitive)

["Daschbach, John L" <John dot Daschbach at pnl dot gov>]

	From: 	Per Bothner

	I have never seen "orthogonality" to mean that.  Normally, it means
	that two (or more) different features when used together make sense,
	combine in positive ways, and the specification doesn't have strange
	exceptions to deal with the combination.

Interesting.  I have a pretty good understanding of orthogonal in the
mathematical inner product space sense and in general use in the discussion of
ideas.  While I don't find your definitions to be incorrect they don't convey to
me what I think of as orthogonal.  A purely orthogonal set of functions would
mean that given any function you could not duplicate it's functionality with any
combination of the remaining functions.  'car' and 'cdr' are clearly part of the
orthogonal basis set of scheme.  A function like 'cadr' is not orthogonal to
'car' and 'cdr', at least in a mathematical or discussion of ideas sense, yet it
meets your requirements.

Is this usage the common one in computer science rather than a more
straightforward extrapolation of the mathematical and language concept?  Is
there a reference for this?

-John

	-- 
		--Per Bothner
	per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/~per/