Re: 'withing' problem

["Matthew Heaney" <mheaney@on2.com>]

"Simon Wright" <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message
news:x7vd72gi0zm.fsf@smaug.pushface.org...
> If there is a real-world circularity between doctor and patient, and
> our software engineering tools can't cope with it, it's the tools that
> have failed and not the real world!

This reminds me of something I read on Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance.  When the platypus was discovered (it's a mammal
that lays eggs), scientists concluded that it was a freak of nature!
Pirsig/Phaedrus argued that that was a ridiculous reaction.  Nature does
whatever works, however odd humans may find that.  That some animal doesn't
neatly fit into a the taxonomy crafted by human observers is irrelevant.

The issue here is that none of us agree what "failure" means.  I am
satisfied that the Doctor/Patient relationship can be modeled adequately.
Yes, there is some syntactic baggage that is required, and there's an extra
Tag_Check I'm not crazy about, but for me this gets the job done.  John
Volan argued that no solution was possible at all without a language change,
and I argued that his argument was flawed (by providing a counterexample).

Simon argued that my solution was inadequate, because there was no simple
way to a automatically generate my code from the UML diagram.

Who's right?  The answer of course depends on the observer.