Value (was: Mixing OO and DB)

Marshall wrote:
mAsterdam wrote:
Marshall wrote:

THAT is a definition.
How can I rephrase this to qualify to your standards of what a
definition is?:

[Value]
"A value is unique, eternal, immutable, and is not
fixed in time or space (it has no address)."
- Darren Duncan

Ok, ok. I'll unhide my hidden agenda: nobody responded
my proposal for the glossary until now :-)

Any more silence I'll consider as approval.

Hmmm. Well, this unfortunately isn't just a matter of phrasing.

Yes. I should have left out 'How'. I can't turn this into a definition
by just rephrasing (maybe someone else can, but I can't, we can't).

Example failure: "A value is a blurk that is unique, eternal, immutable, and is not fixed in time or space".
We all have some familiarity, or intuitive notion about
uniqueness, eternity, mutation, and about having something
fixed in time and space, so the next question wou be:
"what's a blurk?" - and I would have no answer to that.

A reply, though, could be: 'Oh that's a term just made up
to get some desirable properties in, without getting into
tribal connotations I'ld have when using a familiar word.

Try, instead of blurk: object, entity, thing

A set of descriptive qualities is not a definition.

If "blurk" would be previously defined or familiar,
it would, right?

Unfortunately where "value" is concerned, it is often the
most low-level terms that are the hardest to define.

Explaining the unexplainable we get into
descriptions, postulates, primitives, dogmas, axioms, assumptions.

So maybe it's one of those?
I do think DD's Value plork (plork = element of the set {postulate, primitive term, dogma, axiom, assumption, description}
captures the notion of value rather well.


By way of example, I'm paying a modest amount of
attention to set theory lately, and it uses terms like
"set" and the membership relation but explicitly does
not define them.

For what it's worth, lately when I think of "value", I just think
"a member of a set."

Is it right to say: you are trying to avoid 'value' as primitive term?
If so may I ask why?
.