On Sun, 19 Jan 2003 16:02:41 -0600
Jon Cast
But, to fully exploit the power of a "functionally-programmed" desktop, the interface should allow the user to map an operation onto all the objects of the panel; in this case the allowed operations should be those that all the object share.
This is fairly easy if you name the operations; then you can use that to compute the intersection of the operations for all the types. If you don't name the operations, then of course the problem becomes undecidable.
Another idea: if I allow the list of objects in the panel to be infinite, obviously the set of allowed operations in a map is the set of operations on "objects". But if I filter an infinite list of objects to all the objects of a certain type, I wish to see all the operations on that type in the possibilities for a map. How would you deal with such a case? Vincenzo