Re: Another idea

On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 06:14:05PM +0100, Stefan Mayrhofer wrote:
> [...]
> would be the representation of this mp3 file decoded to a pcm object.
> looks nice and simple, doesn't? i think this universal identifiers
> should not be used to do anything else than modifying data like
> encoding/decoding. therefore the result for that identifier should
> always be an _object_ either representing a data steam, or structured
> data. identifiers don't result into byte/bit streams. they should always
> refer to an object created in the _system_ (that's what orthogonal means).
> [...]

That's not what orthogonal means. According to the jargon file:

"""
orthogonal

<geometry> At 90 degrees (right angles).

N mutually orthogonal vectors span an N-dimensional
vector space, meaning that, any vector in the space can be
expressed as a linear combination of the vectors. This is
true of any set of N linearly independent vectors.

The term is used loosely to mean mutually independent or well
separated. It is used to describe sets of primitives or
capabilities that, like linearly independent vectors in
geometry, span the entire "capability space" and are in some
sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example,
in logic, the set of operators "not" and "or" is described as
orthogonal, but the set "nand", "or", and "not" is not
(because any one of these can be expressed in terms of the
others).

Also used loosely to mean "irrelevant to", e.g. "This may be
orthogonal to the discussion, but ...", similar to "going off
at a tangent".
"""

It is used in the term "orthogonal persistence" because the code that is
responsible for persistence and that which is persisted are mutually
irrelevant. It doesn't have anything to do with "object ownership", if
such a thing is even defined.