-1 and friends

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 12:56 PM +0200 9/9/00, Gert Doering wrote:
>Hi,
>
>On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 06:14:01PM -0700, Gary E. Miller wrote:
> > On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> > > At 3:46 PM -0700 9/8/00, Gary E. Miller wrote:
> > > >I would also like to argue for more orthogonality between scp,
> > > >ssh and sshd.
> > >
> > > I suspect you did not want to ask for "more orthogonality"...
> >
> > Yes I did.  This is the lingo CPU designers us when they mean that
> > they want a class of instructions to look similar.
>
>Actually, "orthogonal" in mathemathics and physics means exactly the
>opposite: a set of vectors being orthogonal means all of them are at
>right angles to each others, the scalar product being zero...

And indeed, I come from a physics and math background...  :-)
(many years ago).

I still tend to use it the same way in computer science contexts,
although that might not be standard practice.  If I were to say
the options in a set of commands should be orthogonal, I would
mean that the options for one command would be unrelated to the
options for another command in that set.  If I want the options
to be the same across a set of commands, I would much rather use
the word "consistent", simply because everyone will have the
same idea of what that means.

We now return you to the original topic, instead of this
orthogonal digression...     :-)


---
Garance Alistair Drosehn           =   gad at eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer          or  drosih at rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute