Re: bad-idea-p?



Rob Warnock wrote:
Novus <novus@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
+---------------
| Ken Tilton <kentilton@xxxxxxxxx> said:
| >> Actually, according to the standard convention,....
| > | > Well bless the bozone* layer, I need an autoresponder for you clowns | > (but I /am/ looking forward to the next poster to point out the | > convention).
| | If only the rest of us were as bright as you think you are.
+---------------

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that Ken is simply
pointing out an obvious ambiguity in the convention -- that it really
depends on the etymological evolution of the terms as to which variant
is "correct". That is, if the first thing that happened eons ago was
that someone invented a predicate that asked "Is this thingy here in
my hand an idea?", then a proper name for that might have been IDEAP.
Then if *later* someone came up with a variant which referred to bad
ideas, then the proper spelling of the variant would be BAD-IDEAP.
But on the other hand, if in the beginning of time the first reference
was to a BAD-IDEA type, than the later creation of a predicate to
inquire as to whether an object was of that type would properly be
spelled BAD-IDEA-P.

And then when someone decided to test for ideaness they would be expected to parallel bad-idea-p with idea-p? Intriguing, not what I was thinking, and given the standard lack of interest in consistency people keep quoting to me I would expect ideap to fit right in even with a bad-idea-p toehold.

Lot's of things are being missed. "We got this wrong" implies "we the community got this wrong" meaning "I think the convention is wrong." That was missed. Another thing being missed is that I have written about 300kloc Lisp over eleven years so it's a tad silly to quote me the convention. Another thing being missed is folks (innocently enough) not reading the whole thread, where they would discover I pointed all this out to the first bozone molecule that did quote me the convention. Also being missed is how much I enjoyed the Washington Post piece and my eagerness to use one of the coinages. Further missed is my longstanding obsession with The Rectifcation of Names (thx to the reknowned JS for that bit of Confucianism), which may not be apparent from my c.l.l opus but which will be on the Kenny Final Exam so add it to your notes if it is not already there.


That is, for some predicates you cannot unambiguously determine
a single "correct" spelling without knowing the historical usage
of its subcomponent names. [And maybe not even then...]

I think we have a precedent. In English, that is. Possessives of singluar nouns are formed by adding apostrophe ess, even if the singular noun ends in ess: it's BLISS's inventors at CMU, not BLISS' inventors. Most native english speakers get this wrong, thinking the plural rule (just an apostrope) applies because lotsa plurals end in ess. bzzzt. Likewise, predicate names should always be formed the same way, as would a robot or code-writing algorithm.

Meanwhile, note the peloria*:

nconc
nstring-capitalize

Q-frickin-ED, and fortunately Team Bozone has no standard justification of this inconsistent consistency to point out to me every other flame.

kenny

* Unusual regularity in the form of a flower that is normally irregular.
-- http://www.thefreedictionary.com/peloria

--
The Dalai Lama gets the same crap all the time.
-- Kenny Tilton on c.l.l when accused of immodesty
.

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