zz: virtual cells (was Re: [zzdev] "Virtual" (was: Re: [zzdev] Some thoughts on virtual structures)

[Ted Nelson <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all--

I intended the term "virtual cells" to mean non-persistent
 but well-defined cells that were there whenever you need them,
 for example calendar cells five years from now.  These would
 be automatically generated when you wanted to look at them,
 but would only become persistent if you linked to them,
 gave them contents etc.

Best, Ted


At 11:38 AM 10/19/01 +0200, you wrote:
>
>Brent Turcotte wrote:
>> "Virtual structures, which enable any data, such as Web pages
>> and conventional databases, to be seen through the ZigZag structure"
>> 
>> -- from the "GZigZag in a Nutshell" article at
>> http://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/nutshell.html
>> 
>> A virtual structure is a mapping of data onto a hypergrid
>> implementation, as I understand it.
>
>Hi Brent,
>
>I do not think the term is particularly suited to this meaning. I don't
>understand the nutshell article the same way you do, either, but that's
>less important IMHO; I think what's important is to agree on a useful term.
>
>The adjective "virtual" invokes the question: "So what's the real
>counterpart?" What's a real structure, as opposed to a mapping of data
>onto a hypergrid implementation? Makes no sense to me. For me, there are
>two associations here: Ted's notion of a "virtuality" as opposed to
>"reality:" a designed environment that is enacted e.g. on a computer
>screen and that only exists in our heads; and the notion of "virtual
>cells" as opposed to "real cells," where the real cells are those in a
>hypergrid structure that are saved on the harddisk, whereas the virtual
>ones are those that the computer constructs on-the-fly, for example the
>numbers in a representation of the natural number system. There can only
>be a finite number of real cells, as storage is limited, but, as the
>example shows, a theoretically infinite number of virtual cells.
>
>To get back to the article, it is my understanding that it uses the term
>in this latter sense: the computer shows "virtual" cells that represent
>*external* data: a web page as retrieved through HTML; the contents of a
>database as queried through SQL. So when you used "virtual structures"
>in conjunction with file formats, I thought you might be talking about,
>similarly, representing the contents of a file as seen through the file
>system, not stored in the hypergrid.
>
>I cannot see a good reason to use the term "*virtual* structures" for
>"mapping of data onto a hypergrid implementation," and I would propose
>to simply use "hypergrid structure" instead; does this capture your
>meaning? Or am I missing some good reason to use "virtual structure" instead?
>
>Hope that we can agree on something,
>- Benja
>
_________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson              
Project Professor, Keio University SFC Campus, Fujisawa, Japan
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