On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Dougal Stanton
'Morally' seems just the perfect word for this occasion --- concerned with right or proper conduct. In this case, potential discrepancies between the files that cabal 'knows' about when issuing different commands; or the sense of deceit when it 'appears' to work only for faults to appear further down the line.
From another angle, here's an example of explicit moral terminology applied to mathematics: http://www.cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk/morality/ The mathematical sense there is slightly different from the
Beyond that, there are long established traditions in some parts of programming and mathematics for using ethical/moral terms to describe qualities that go beyond just technical requirements or correctness; this program should do the Right Thing, that bit of code is "evil", and so on. Actually defining this "moral sense" is difficult, though, and it varies somewhat from one person to another, but there seems to be at least some common, shared understanding. It's about "should" and "proper" instead of "is" or "must". Personally, I know I've written code that I'd feel guilty about even if it worked perfectly and no one else ever saw it--what else would you call that feeling? programming sense, I think, but there seems to be some crossover. For instance, I've gotten the impression that something like a mathematical "moral sense" underlies much of the interest in programming language semantics, FRP, and dependently-typed languages, though I don't know if the people involved would necessarily call it that. - C.