basic conceptual model

[Kevin Bourrillion]

>
> On 13 Dec 2021, at 18:40, John Rose wrote:
>


> > Another (more subtle) stress to your terminology is your assertion that
> a mutable variable “forgets” the previous value when a new value is
> stored.  That isn’t strictly correct in the case of race conditions.  Only
> a volatile variable reliably “forgets” its previous value in the presence
> of races.
>

Indeed there was a revision where "(modulo race conditions)" was there and
I'll put it back.


> You don’t actually define the term “value” but just illustrate it and
> make claims about it.  Maybe you have to do it that way…  Actually, you say
> it’s “unit of data”.  Referring to “data” as a known term (for readers who
> are programmers) is OK.
>

Yes, in general I am sure that I can't accomplish actual ground up
non-cyclical definition-definitions here. I think it should suffice to be
descriptive enough for the reader to course-correct their previous notions
in this direction (provided they want to).


> Saying “unit” is more mysterious.  You certainly don’t mean units of
> measure, or functional programming unit types.  Are you meaning to imply
> that it has no subparts which might also be termed units?


Oh, I actually do not want to imply irreducibility at all. That all values
have had that property in Java is a fact I would label as
incidental-not-essential.,

Glob, gob, blob, hunk, chunk, piece, .....



> That’s OK as long as you have today’s primitives (which I like to call
> “scalar primitives”) and of course references (which are also scalars).  By
> “scalar” I mean an item of data that is not composed of further scalars.
>

A tangent, but there's enough math major still in me to object to this. :-)
Scalars are scalar because they scale things! This would be more similar to
a one-dimensional vector space than to a scalar....  imho the best
adjective for today's primitives is "primitive" and I'll plead my case
about that soon too. :-)

-- 
Kevin Bourrillion | Java Librarian | Google, Inc. | kevinb at google.com
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