From: Xeno Campanoli <xeno.campanoli@...>
Date: 2009-06-04T06:05:03+09:00
Subject: Is Congruence the right term?

Congruence in math has the implication that things are basically like even if 
they have different aspects or proportions somehow.  I want to use the term for 
things like Ruby which tend to do the same things the same way across classes, 
unlike similarly respectable languages (I consider Perl and Python similar, but 
wouldn't want to fight about that) which have less of a tendency to carry such 
similarities.

Is it appropriate to use the word 'congruence' for this?  If not it would be 
very nice if there were a word to use.  'similar' is too general, and it would 
be unfortunate to have to come up with a word like 'organic', as the food people 
did which might also spark unfortunate controversy.

To me, if x is a string, and y is of class Blek, if they both have method 
'length', then in that way x.length and y.length would constitute some aspect of 
congruence, and if both class A had a method xyz and B had a class that yielded 
similar results, then they would have in that method a congruent aspect, 
especially if the method took the same kinds of arguments.

xc