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November 22, 2004

no means yes and yes means no

ConteX has gained a new evaluation technique: "live contextualization"."no means yes and yes means no!" This really means that it is not impossible to say the original word 'no'. This is the effect of live contextualization, a term I made to label the way the CX interpreter now evaluates code.

ConteX has changed significantly in the past 2 weeks. New features include file reading, primitives that give control over parsing and evaluation, and even support for complex numbers, big numbers, ratios, and numbers with hundreds of digits, ( from a math lib thanx to a code share from Slava Prestov. ) So now we are presented with a whole new set of problems before the release of ConteX 0.36. These problems circle around implementing 'inp', and contextualizing order.

Contextualizing order is actually the problem. Inp is a matter of my design, and is practically already solved. Anyway, in CX, 1 day ago, the following would happen:

set["x" 3]
set["talk" { set["x" 4] print x }]
talk

computer returns 3

Ugly , huh? This is because that code is contextualized into literals FIRST, then evaluated. Instead, each word needs to be contextualized and THEN evaluated. This is in the works right now. Contextualizing and evaluating each word- one at a time- is the key.

This has been fixed. Now, the Evaluater has a great design that contextualizes each word, and evaluates them. Only thing is that inp is broken again. oh noooo!

In our initial example, no means yes and THEN yes means no:


set["no" "yes"]
set["yes" no]
[ yes no ] => [ "yes" "yes" ]

( this is the only way to convert the english sentence into CX without ever referring to a word that doesnt exist, yet applying live contextualization )
When someone says "no means yes and yes means no", if you applied the new defintion of "no" at the "and", then by the time the person says "and yes means no", it means "yes means ( no, which means "yes")", or "yes means yes". Now, no means yes and yes means yes and there is no way to say no!
Try explaining that to your friend: "Applying live contextualization, you've taken away the ability to use the original meaning of 'no' !"

Posted by Rex at November 22, 2004 05:34 AM

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