Philosophy of basic Q

[Patrick Dowler]

On Tuesday 11 May 2004 08:51, Martin @ ROE wrote:
> Brian Thomas wrote:
> > 	Well, my concept of BasicQ (and I don't think I'm alone on this)
> > 	is that it was for _holding a single value_, not to make
>
> something
>
> > 	"really simple".
>
> In that case can we change the name to SingleQuantity?  There's not
> enough distinction between 'Core' and 'Basic'!

The correct term for it is "atomic" which is what Gerard and I used in the
much maligned and misunderstood "unified domain model for astronomy" :-)
But I got voted down on having AtomicQuantity in the current doc in favour of 
"more friendly and less CS-ey" terminology.

Also, no one seems to have noticed that CoreQ allows for either arrays or 
components (parent-child structure) BUT NOT BOTH at the same time!!!

I also argued unsuccessfully that these two kinds of things should be 
separate, which I why (way back last fall after adass) I proposed
AtomicQuantity, ArrayQuantity, and CompositeQuantity as 3 sibling types
(the domain model didn't have ArrayQuantity). But that eventually got shot 
down in favour of cramming several distinct concepts together....

-- 
Patrick Dowler
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