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josh11bandRichard Smith
fdb1893544
To talk about generics as a programming language feature, you need a lot of specialized terminology. We need to agree on the words we are using and their meaning before we can meaningfully talk about the design of the feature itself. There a number of problems a glossary solves: Not everyone knows every term, so having a single place to look them up will improve the ease of understanding, ease of contributing, and accessibility of the project. There may not be widespread agreement on the meaning of some terms. In particular, individual programming languages tend to assign very specific meanings to terms used within their ecosystem. Some terms may be used in multiple ways, but we only use the term with one specific meaning. Some terms are our invention and we need to introduce them. Co-authored-by: Richard Smith <richard@metafoo.co.uk>
37 lines
1.3 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
1.3 KiB
Markdown
# Generics terminology
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<!--
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Part of the Carbon Language project, under the Apache License v2.0 with LLVM
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Exceptions. See /LICENSE for license information.
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SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception
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-->
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[Pull request](https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/447)
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## Problem
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To talk about generics as a programming language feature, you need a lot of
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specialized terminology. We need to agree on the words we are using and their
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meaning before we can meaningfully talk about the design of the feature itself.
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There a number of problems a glossary solves:
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- Not everyone knows every term, so having a single place to look them up will
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improve the ease of understanding, ease of contributing, and accessibility
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of the project.
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- There may not be widespread agreement on the meaning of some terms. In
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particular, individual programming languages tend to assign very specific
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|
meanings to terms used within their ecosystem.
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- Some terms may be used in multiple ways, but we only use the term with one
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specific meaning.
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- Some terms are our invention and we need to introduce them.
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## Proposal
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See the [generics terminology document](../docs/design/generics/terminology.md).
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## Rationale
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This gives a common vocabulary for discussing the design of the generics
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feature.
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