30 Jul
2003
30 Jul
'03
2:26 a.m.
G'day all. On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 11:34:09PM +0200, Sven Panne wrote:
From a user perspective, yes. But deeper hierarchies are sometimes useful for the implementation of larger APIs. And people in biology are quite happy with a *much* deeper hierarchy: :-)
At the moment, a tree-shaped hierarchy works fine for biology. When genetic engineering gets to the point where you can cross a kangaroo with a dragonfly, then the situation will be more analogous to what we face in software engineering. Our taxonomies are, for better or worse, DAG-shaped. SSL, for example, can legitimately go under both "network communication" and "cryptography", which are quite different fields of computer science. Cheers, Andrew Bromage