On Sep 22, 2004, at 9:32 AM, Dan Nagle wrote:
> Ordinary English words have their ordinary meanings
> within the standard, unless ISO or the standard redefine them.
...
> The standard defines the standard, implementations do not.
Agree. But I know of no precise ordinary English meaning of
"associated with the whole of an allocated target object." Nor
is it clear to me that it is well-defined in the standard. My
best guess at interpretation is that
allocate(Q(10))
P => Q(:)
does not associate P with the whole of the allocated target object,
but I could understand a different interpretation.
Yes, the words are as defined by the standard or by ordinary
English. That being the case, if you think the definition unambiguous,
then what does that definition say about whether P above is or is
not associated with the whole of the allocated target object?
And can you cite the words of the definition that have this
unambiguous interpretation.
Maybe you can and I'm just overlooking something simple in the
standard. But so far, I haven't seen any definitions cited, either
ordinary English ones or ones from the standard. I'm more interested
in what the specific definitions are than in generalizations about where
one would find definitions. If it is in the standard, maybe I just
missed
it (I didn't look very hard, I'll admit).
If we are just reduced to "the answer is obvious from normal English",
then I don't think that's good enough because it isn't obvious to me
and I think that debates about whether or not something is obvious
are self-answering (unless one subscribes to my old major prof's
definition of "obvious", which was that he could solve it with no more
than a few weeks of work.)
Oh yes. An afterthought. If we are dealing with ordinary English usage
and "the whole definition of whole is whole", then I assume we are
also acknowledging the ordinary English saying, common enough to
have cliche status, that "the whole is greater than the sum of the
parts?"
I'd say that saying is surprisingly apt here in that I think that a
slice that
includes all the parts (elements) of an array is not the whole array; it
is missing what I might call the "wholeness" attribute. In cases like
allocatables, I can say much more concretely and certainly that
it is missing the allocatable attribute.
My copy of the OED is at home, but I'd place good odds that it takes
quite a bit of text and has many variants of the ordinary English
word "whole". "Simple" words like that tend to be ones that get
the most variant and subtly different meanings.
--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
[log in to unmask] | experience comes from bad judgment.
| -- Mark Twain
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