Re: Identity modelling

dawn wrote:
> Marshall Spight wrote:
> > > I think your use of "pointer" here is very extreme
> >
> > I'm okay with that. :-)
>
> Good. I myself shy away from such extremes ;-)

"...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

But mostly what I meant was that I was okay that you considered [Quoted] it extreme. I am trying to highlight the significance of content based addressing. It's not just another kind of pointer. It's different.

> > > There is nothing hidden or behind the scenes about a URL.
> > > One issue I see is that you opted to talk about
> > > modeling the html file, rather than all of the data under
> > > consideration.
> >
> > I don't understand this statement. Did I say it needed to be hidden?
>
> No, I was still referring to lines between what is a pointer and what
> is not. A value that is entered by humans routinely is not a likely
> candidate to be termed a "pointer" unless every value that points is a
> pointer.

What is a pointer if not a thing that points?

[Quoted] I agree that a human entered value is unlikely to be a hardware memory address, but I'm not sure of the relevance.

> > > So, perhaps if you add in the URL to the data you are
> > > modeling, you will agree that it is, indeed, a key?
> >
> > Yes: if the URL was *in* the html, and we accessed it by
> > looking for an html document with a specified URL, then it
> > would be a key.
>
> Would you be OK with saying that the URL is a key TO the full web page,
> while not being a key OF the html page?

What you're calling a "key TO" is a location, an address, a pointer.

> It sounds like you would be OK
> with that iff we defined the full web page to include both the URL and
> the html

That's necessary but not sufficient.

> (not typically how "web page" is used).

[Quoted] Yes, because the web doesn't used content-addressable storage. Yes, because URLs are pointers.

> When working with key-value pairs, it is common to say that the key is
> a key to that value. Why would we want to redefine that term to make
> that inaccurate?

We're not doing that. The key is part of the map. Check out, for example, java.util.Map.Entry.

> Maybe we should just say that the URL is a key, but not a relational
> key to the web page?

[Quoted] You are of course free to call it that. I'm going to call it a pointer to the web page.

Marshall Received on Thu Sep 01 2005 - 05:47:56 CEST