GRAVITY SIX -- Monday, September 21, 1992

Brevity, again.

( Hey! There's a good idea. Someone should come up with a Smalltalk take-off and call it Brevity. That's a great name for an Objective C kind of language... any takers? A freebie. I take no credit for it. )

A Gravity item is a named unit of information. That's what makes an item an item. It has a Gravity name associated with it.

As I said earlier, Gravity names have five possible parts. What I
didn't say is that these five parts are referred to by nifty two-letter
words that make things easy to draw in my design books:

OF - the ThoughtShop where the item is located
BY - the Agent that created the item
AM - the uniquely identifying Item designation
IF - a Rule to follow if action is required
SO - an Option used by an Agent to process a Rule

Now syntactically, this looks like this:

< OF : BY | AM | IF : SO >

which is the same as:

< ThoughtShop : Agent | Item | Rule : Option >

You can remember the sequence of a Gravity name as OF/BY/AM/IF/SO or as CAIRO. The only part that is required in an item reference is the middle part, the Item or AM part. The other parts can be supplied by the agent's context... but here I'm getting way ahead of myself.

Before I can talk about contexts, I've got to explain ThoughtShops & agents.

(How's this for brevity. Getting bored yet? I hope the liberal arts crowd is still listening. Tomorrow's talk on ThoughtShops should be more interesting.)

From: Andrew Palfreyman (in response to something else)