From: pharrington <xenogenesis@...>
Date: 2009-06-04T10:45:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Is Congruence the right term?

is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Type the term you're looking for?

On Jun 3, 5:05 pm, Xeno Campanoli <xeno.campan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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