Re: CCAT: TIME: Fantasyland?/Various issues

Danny Bobrow <bobrow@parc.xerox.com>
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Date: 	Wed, 19 Oct 1994 15:39:31 PDT
From: Danny Bobrow <bobrow@parc.xerox.com>
To: Danny Bobrow <bobrow@parc.xerox.com>, dwig@markv.com,
        Fritz Lehmann <fritz@rodin.wustl.edu>, phayes@cs.uiuc.edu (Pat Hayes)
Subject: Re: CCAT: TIME: Fantasyland?/Various issues
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Excerpts from mail: 19-Oct-94 Re: CCAT: TIME: Fantasyland.. Pat
Hayes@cs.uiuc.edu (3170*)

>  In fact there are some generally
> useful ideas that can be defined very abstractly, such as the sequence of
> n'th things from a sequence of sequences, etc.; there might be a useful
> general-purpose theory of counting and selecting.
Yes, but I did not mean to imply a reductionist approach (let's get back
down to numbers).  There is a general notion of selection, and we have
"macro concepts" for selection such as "every other one", e"veryone of a
certain name (e.g every Tuesday)" , and importing this high level
general notion of selection of elements from ordered sets, and the well
known sets of months, weeks, days, hours of the day, provide well
understood ordered elements.

This is not fancy algebras, it is composition of high level concepts
that are used in many places.

danny


Excerpts from mail: 19-Oct-94 Re: CCAT: TIME: Fantasyland.. Pat
Hayes@cs.uiuc.edu (3170*)

>  In fact there are some generally
> useful ideas that can be defined very abstractly, such as the sequence of
> n'th things from a sequence of sequences, etc.; there might be a useful
> general-purpose theory of counting and selecting.