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Re: Make implicit structures explicit

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 09:03:53 +0100

> 
> 	Make implicit structures explicit.
> 

Could you define what you mean by "implicit" and "explicit"?

I think your two representations have the same information content.

I think (and it seems most respondents think) that representing a sequence of maintenance tasks as a sequence of task elements is more explicit than representing it as an unordered set of (number, task) pairs. Several reasons:

(a) extracting the ordered sequence of tasks from a set of (number, task) pairs requires more processing (mental or computer processing)

(b) the set of (number, task) pairs is an inaccurate model because it can represent things that are not valid, e.g. two tasks with the same number.

(c) it's not in any sense "explicit" that the numbers in the second representation are intended to be interpreted as sequence numbers; they could for example represent the expected duration of the task.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

• References:
  • Make implicit structures explicit
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>