MtnViewMark wrote:The issue of "is it context free" or not is more than just pedantic: Being context free is what makes the approach to expansion in the program feasible.
Oh, I'm not suggesting otherwise, nor am I bucking to overthrow the principle. My twisted enjoyment is rather in the philosophical challenges of determining what counts as context.
For example, I can position myself absolutely from any shape rule, at any depth, along the dimension of rule objects using their names. (I'm being facetious)
From another perspective, one can simply create a new rule for each context. And so on.
The hard part will be allowing people to encode ways in which parameters can interact with each other (think of how scale affects both x and y), and allow expressions (sin, cos, etc...) without violating this principle.
My suggestion plays with the boundary of what counts as receiving context information.
It is on the one hand just another dimension whose absolute value cannot be examined or tested explicitly.
On the other hand, it can influence adjustments, and its effects can be coordinated mathematically.
The shape rule itself is oblivious to these machinations.
As you say, it's really about feasibility.
The first thing I noticed about expressions is that they are always and only constants in disguise, from which I assume that all the matrices are built before anything happens.
In that case, my suggestion violates the current scheme, as must any that allows variables in adjustments.
General parameterization is a much broader issue than what I suggest, and not one that I have thought through nearly well enough to comment on.
... might be a bit surprising for people who are expecting the parameters to be like arguments in a programming language.
I hope so. I suspect that I would lose interest if things got that loose.
Several idea-chains have started running around my mind, but I'll let them mature when I have time rather than go on a disastrous freestyle exposition now.
[edit]
Continuing discussion on
the original parameterization thread