Re: spoon-discuss: Re: spoon-business: [[Avoiding Entropy]]

["Glotmorf" <glotmorf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/1/02 at 9:56 PM Wonko wrote:

>Then the map is a physical representation of a fictitious territory; how
>could one possibly claim that the map *is* a fictitious territory?

Because the territory can't exist without the map.  Just as the quote can't exist without the quoted.

>No - to quote it is to repeat the same pattern of letters. Which I did.
>Whether or not the meaning is the same is entirely independant.
>
>Admittedly, a quote cannot be considered a quote without having something
>to
>quote from; however, it does not have to mean the same thing as the quoted
>passage.

Okay, forget the meaning.  Admittedly, r8 doesn't address meaning.  You could have done it ransom-note style like I did, and the collection of quoted words would probably not mean anything close to the things the words came from. (In fact, looking at your proposals now, it looks like you only needed to change, what, four words total?  So I gather you just did that whole quote-the-comment thang for either entertainment value or conceptual bench-testing? :)

>By your earlier definition of 'to quote' - "to repeat a brief passage or
>excerpt from", combined with the above logic, if I go [[this]], then the
>word "this" could never again have the force of law, as any usage of it
>would be a repetition of something which is quoted.

The word "this" could indeed have the force of law.  As long as it's not a quote from "[[this]]".  That's my point.  You could have had all those words in the comment, then repeated all those words outside the comment, and it wouldn't have violated r8. (Whether it'd've violated the entropy rule is another matter.)  But you linked the two by saying one was a quote from the other.

>The point is, it doesn't matter where text has been. What matters,
>according
>to r8, is whether or not the specific instance of text in question is, at
>that moment, encased in comment brackets. Although I may be quoting from a
>comment, the quote itself is not commented. The quote exists independantly
>of the text not quoted.

I don't follow that last sentence.  But r8 doesn't use the phrase "does not" or the phrase "can not", which would address "at that moment"; it uses the phrase "shall not" which addresses future uses as well as current ones.  Which means that when it's created as a comment it can't be used in rules, and when it's quoted from comments it still can't be used in rules.

						Glotmorf