RE: Language design values (Re: message primitive)

["Reynolds, Gregg" <greynolds at datalogics dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daschbach, John L [mailto:John.Daschbach@pnl.gov]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2000 2:32 PM
...
> me what I think of as orthogonal.  A purely orthogonal set of 
> functions would
> mean that given any function you could not duplicate it's 
> functionality with any
> combination of the remaining functions.  'car' and 'cdr' are 


Question:  how can one express the notion that the members of the basis set
themselves are maximally simple?  Presumably one could define a basis set
that includes semantically complex functions which could be expressed as a
combination of a different basis set.  I'm having trouble at the moment
coming up with a realistic example, but suppose you had a "frobnicate"
function that really means "first bevorpilate, then pibbelize", but the
latter two are excluded from the language for some reason, or are always
implicit in other primitives.  Is there a term from mathematics that one
could use to indicate a basis set has or has not been maximally decomposed?

Thanks,
-gregg