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Saturday, May 28, 2005

Understanding logic

Here's a post where I go "beyond" and talk about logic, which plays a major role in computer development, but I think there are a lot of misconceptions about logic and what it is.

Essentially, a logical statement links a truth to itself.

Easily people are confused on this point possibly because of the way logic is taught, so like if you have something like:

"if A=B, and B=C, then A=C."

And there it appears that you have different things, but if A=B, then does that not mean they are the same? But the letter 'A' is NOT the letter 'B'!!!

What gives?

Well for programmers it's easy because we know about references. The letter 'A' is just a reference to something else, kind of like if you put a yellow sticky note on a car that says, 'A'.

With that sticky note on the car you can say, put A over in that parking lot, or A really needs a new paint job!

But 'A' is not the car.

It's a reference to the car.

If you get confused on that point then you may see contradiction in logic from the start, so it's an essential point, learning about references.

Now let's move on to more advanced topics with some basic truths or axioms about logic itself, and I'll show you how a supposed paradox is handled, just so you can see the effectiveness of the axioms.

And, oh yeah, what's the point?

Well, for developers, understanding logic is crucial for writing programs that are themselves logical, less buggy, and less likely to do weird and bizarre things that confound everyone!

LOGICAL FORMEDNESS AXIOMS


1. Identical sets are identical.

2. Different sets are different.

3. Statements contradicting axioms 1 or 2 are false or malformed.

4. A malformed statement is one for which a conclusion does not follow given its structure.

5. A false statement is one that while structurally correct is not true.

The "structure" I mean has to do with how the sentence is put together.

For instance, the following is a badly structured syllogism:

If x=1, and y=2, then x=y.

The basic structure for the syllogism--the well-formed structure--is,

if a=b, and b=c, then a=c,

and variations on that structure are to be considered malformed.

Notice that with the first given that x does not equal y, the conclusion is false, but the entire statement is malformed so that is secondary.

With the basic axioms established--and notice how simple they are--it's trivial to handle supposed paradoxes which reduce to attacking one of the first two axioms.

For instance, the so-called Russell Paradox reduces to the assertion that a set includes and excludes itself.

Let A be a set that includes itself, and let B be a set that excludes itself.

B is different from A.

Therefore, by axiom 2 any statement that B is A is malformed or false.

Stating that B is A and B is different from A is structurally wrong, so the full statement is malformed.

Notice also that the resolution to the supposed paradox is the well-formed statement:

Consider a set A that includes all sets, except itself, that exclude themselves.

Notice that the axioms prevent that set from including itself, as then you reduce to a set that both includes and excludes itself, against axiom 2 as I explained.


James Harris

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Release! Class Viewer 2.0b

Maybe this is why I have a blog as I just can't express the emotional high of doing a file release. I don't even quite understand it myself, but when you put up that new release and off it goes, there's just this surge of emotion. Silly? Maybe, but I feel it anyway.

I'm doing a dinky release with out a lot of changes after a recent release because I decided I needed to fix some things that are kind of quirky in 2.0a and finally have the program tell you if it's in applet mode or not.

And the big change is to have Class Viewer default to the top of the list when you end up with a scrollbar, rather than the bottom.

So now, yeah, maybe it's more like a normal program, but what do I do now?

I'll feel happy about the new release for a while and then try to figure out what to do next.


James

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

XML More Than The Hype

Despite the volume of work with XML it is still underrated and underappreciated at this time as a format that allows a tremendous number of different systems to talk to each other.

Like, in Class Viewer, I use XML to let human beings talk to the system, telling it where to find javadocs, and what packages it should know.

By using XML, the Class Viewer program is actually capable of being used indefinitely, as long as Sun Microsystems doesn't change the format for finding javadocs, or how Java Reflections work.

So it's in a way a perfect app--here today, useable indefinitely.

And that's thanks to XML.


James