Re: what does "serialization" mean?

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/23/04 

Date: 22 Jun 2004 19:35:05 -0700

Mike <m.fee@nospam.irl.cri.nz> wrote in message news:<MPG.1b4365c1a7bc317d9896d6@newshost.comnet.co.nz>...
> In article <f5dda427.0406212134.56726a09
> @posting.google.com>, spinoza1111@yahoo.com says...
> > Mike <m.fee@nospam.irl.cri.nz> wrote in message news:<MPG.1b425e1a9c1165299896d0@newshost.comnet.co.nz>...
> > > In article <f5dda427.0406211552.1296f156
> > > @posting.google.com>, spinoza1111@yahoo.com says...
> > > > Thomas Stegen <tstegen@cis.strath.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<2joa36F12se9jU1@uni-berlin.de>...
> > > > > Edward G. Nilges wrote:
>
> > > > > > Of course, a "little language" which preserves the eye-readable
> > > > > > structure of data in a complete palindromic sense
> > > > >
> > > > > Palindromic sense? You mean symmetric? Very strange indeed...
> > > >
> > > > deserialize(serialize(thing)) == thing
> > > >
> > > > This is what palindromic means to me.
> > > >
> > > Perhaps 'reversible' would be a better term to use....
> >
> > The majority of people in the world are completely uninterested in
> > these matters; therefore, I don't think their interpretations matter.
> >
> The majority of people in the world also attempt to use
> a word in one of its accepted meanings or definitions,
> or create a new meaning only when no acceptable
> alternative exists. It is fine to coin a new definition
> for a word but:
> 1) this isn't generally useful when another perfectly
> good word already exists, and;
> 2) when doing so it is useful to pick a word that
> already has close to the required sense of meaning

This misapplies the sort of thinking I find characteristic of the
worst sort of English teacher to a mathematical activity.

The received wisdom is twofold: (1) one never "creates" language, only
uses it "correctly" and thus is accepted in polite circles and (2)
"correctness" is however not defined by tradition or the natural law
of any sort but by "generally accepted usage".

This received wisdom is massively incoherent because the referent of
"general usage" is one of those terms that is conveniently vague for
political reasons, like "terrorist". It in fact becomes any society to
which the student desires to be accepted no matter how deviant.

The received wisdom manages to be far more moronized than the usage in
a society like that of ancient China, where tradition was controlling,
or the Catholic Church, where definitions and right-naming was
Scholastically derived from natural law.

This is because the referent of accepted usage becomes, in a truly
Humpty Dumpty fashion, not what "I" would like it to be but what
unnamed power would like it to be.

Insistence on this creates havoc in systems analysis and in
programming because when people start insisting on "accepted" usage,
the problem is that "accepted" usage is unusably vague...with the
normalized deviant result that the system encapsulates prejudice,
sometimes in a literal sense.

In the 1980s the computer field was overrun by rejects from the
humanities owing to their expansion in the 1960s and subsequent
contraction. Thus English majors in this era started insisting on
avoidance of terms of art and a misconstrued "simplicity of language"
with disastrous results in MIS.

>
> > It is in fact correct to say that the palindrome of a string is its
> > reverse, and that a palindromic string is identical to its
> > re(in)verse. Therefore a function like serialize is palindromic if it
> > has a proper inverse.
>
> In this case:
> 1) already existing terms 'reversible function' or
> 'reversible transform' are available. I think they would
> be simpler and clearer in meaning to most of the
> audience in this group, and;
> 2) palindromic has such a specialised meaning that
> one is forced to 'undefine' it, so to speak, to apply it
> in the manner you suggest. A palindrome is symmetric, it
> might be considered as its own inverse, or as an
> identity under the 'reversing' operator. I can envisage
> functional forms that might be described as palindromic,
> but -merely- reversible doesn't make the grade.
>
> In essense, to coin the definitoin palindromic =
> reversible, weakens the meaning of palindromic and,
> ultimately, weakens the language.

Oh dear, weakening the language. Look, buddy, what weakens the
language is insistence on following vague usage. Look, friend, what
weakens the language is two spelling errors in the same line. Look,
dear heart, I'm the best thing that's happened to the English language
since Henry James. Behold, mein gnadige Friend, a static language is a
dead language.

"Reversible" is bad usage here because like many generally accepted
terms in this area, it imparts a physical metaphor such that
"reversible" is like a car's reversibility, in which it has "reversed"
EVEN IF it has not returned to its starting point.

Whereas palindromic by its very strangeness INSISTS that you are
either palindromic in my sense such that

     palindromic(f,g) iff g(f(x))=x

or else you must leave the room and take a shower.

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