[FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

[Marcus Daniels]

Nick writes:

"It is a writer's job to control the reference of his signs, in so far as s/he can.  In writing code, you guys wouldn't put out a line of code without making clear what language you were writing in, would you?"

Many non-trivial programs invent their own abstractions s and work within that set of primitives rather than just the ones provided by the language.   Many modern languages go to some length to provide facilities for this in the form of programmable code expansion -- code that forms code.  In some sense the "language you are writing in" must be learned per project.   This goes beyond what I would call notation.  As its definition is available in the project source code, at some point it becomes redundant to keep talking about it.

Marcus