Re: [boost] powerset

From: kath_at_[hidden]
Date: 2002-08-28 14:41:41

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Dave Gomboc wrote:

> > >If all the elements of the set are known at compile time, why
> > >do you need to store the bits at all? Your class can encode
> > >the information in its type, thus, your class can consume
> > >zero bytes.
> > 
> > right up until you need to add (or subtract) something that isn't knows 
> > until runtime.
> 
> ...which doesn't always happen.  There are certainly things I could use it
> for at compile-time, rather than my existing practice of generating a
> header file containing an array of magic numbers with an external program.
> 
> Back to naming: this new proposed set is no more discrete than the STL's
> set, so "discrete_set" is a misnomer.  I think that the best name I've
> heard so far here for it (other than "set", which is taken :-) is
> "powerset".  Was there something wrong with that suggestion?
> 

Hello,

Nothing personal but this reference to powerset causes me to cringe as 
inconsistent with the accepted definition of "power set."

There's a large body of mathematical terminology (and mathematics itself) 
borrowed and integrated into CS.  Can we please try to be consistent and 
non-contradictory in language in order to avoid unnecessary confusion?

I don't read this list as carefully as I would like, so apologies for 
butting in here.  In the future I'll try to follow these threads more 
carefully.

Sincerely,
Kathy Gerber

  

> Also (albeit without having put much thought into it) it seems to me that 
> there ought to be a lot of overlap with bitset/dyn_bitset/etc.  Can all of 
> these be rolled into one somehow?
> 
> Dave
> 
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