Calling all Greek/Latin experts!
Nov. 23rd, 2005 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
compilerbitchHi all,
I have an urgent need for one or more new words for a mathematics paper I'm currently writing. We are trying to create a taxonomy of existing approaches to hardware analysis, but no actual accepted terminology currently exists. Tradition has it that new terms should probably derive from Greek and/or Latin, hence the plea for help from people-who-know-about-such-stuff.
Anyway, I'll describe the things we're trying to describe, so suggestions of good sounding relevant technical terms would be much appreciated!
Timeless, time free, not requiring consideration of time, time independent. Our best guess so far is achronous. Technically, an achronous model would represent the behaviour of a circuit without taking into account the absolute time(s) at which signals change state.
Non-achronous, something denoting the opposite of the previous case, technically models of circuit behaviour that do take into account absolute time.
'Absolute time', here I'm looking for something that would fit into the same bit of a sentence as 'achronous', but that means 'depending on absolute time'.
'Stretchy time'
'Rigid time'
'Independent time'
'Relational/related time'
'Unknown time' (variants including 'unknown within a range' and 'completely unknown' would be handy)
'Sliced-up time' where slices may be arbitrarily thick.
'Sliced-up time' where slices are of equal, regular duration (think 'clock ticking').
'Ordered time' (here, I mean order in the sense of partial/total order, e.g. 1,2,3,4... rather than something political)
It would be a good idea to avoid existing terms, e.g. synchronous, asynchronous, because I'd rather have distinct, new terms that won't have existing overloaded meaning though they should still be intuitively meaningful. Also, nothing too long -- we really need single words rather than phrases.
The world of science thanks you in advance!
Edit: It's looking like achronal is in pole position at the moment. It's already in use in my current draft, which you can see here if you have the stomach for a heavily mathematical 31 page bludgeon-of-a-journal-paper.
I have an urgent need for one or more new words for a mathematics paper I'm currently writing. We are trying to create a taxonomy of existing approaches to hardware analysis, but no actual accepted terminology currently exists. Tradition has it that new terms should probably derive from Greek and/or Latin, hence the plea for help from people-who-know-about-such-stuff.
Anyway, I'll describe the things we're trying to describe, so suggestions of good sounding relevant technical terms would be much appreciated!
Timeless, time free, not requiring consideration of time, time independent. Our best guess so far is achronous. Technically, an achronous model would represent the behaviour of a circuit without taking into account the absolute time(s) at which signals change state.
Non-achronous, something denoting the opposite of the previous case, technically models of circuit behaviour that do take into account absolute time.
'Absolute time', here I'm looking for something that would fit into the same bit of a sentence as 'achronous', but that means 'depending on absolute time'.
'Stretchy time'
'Rigid time'
'Independent time'
'Relational/related time'
'Unknown time' (variants including 'unknown within a range' and 'completely unknown' would be handy)
'Sliced-up time' where slices may be arbitrarily thick.
'Sliced-up time' where slices are of equal, regular duration (think 'clock ticking').
'Ordered time' (here, I mean order in the sense of partial/total order, e.g. 1,2,3,4... rather than something political)
It would be a good idea to avoid existing terms, e.g. synchronous, asynchronous, because I'd rather have distinct, new terms that won't have existing overloaded meaning though they should still be intuitively meaningful. Also, nothing too long -- we really need single words rather than phrases.
The world of science thanks you in advance!
Edit: It's looking like achronal is in pole position at the moment. It's already in use in my current draft, which you can see here if you have the stomach for a heavily mathematical 31 page bludgeon-of-a-journal-paper.
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Date: 2005-11-23 09:19 pm (UTC)What we're doing is basically a huge land-grab of techniques used to analyse (as in predict) the behaviour of an important class of electronic circuits -- we've come up with a very general framework which subsumes nearly all existing work as special cases, whilst also allows a few new things to be proven. This kind of thing happened in the analysis of software in the 1970s, but for some reason no one has attempted this for hardware. So we have. It's a bit scary, and (it seems) not too popular from some people in the hardware community, especially as we're seen as coming from the software world.
We are Borg! Resistance is futile! All your analyses are belong to us!
OK, specifically what I mean by 'achronous' is essentially to coin a new technical term that describes all analyses of circuits that do not take into account absolute time. As a simple example, if you turn on a light at 8am tomorrow morning, an achronous analysis of what was going on would simply say that the light transitions from off to on, whereas a non-achronous analysis might record the exact time at which the light turned on, or perhaps note that the light will be turned on strictly after you get out of bed and strictly before you brush your teeth.
Our kind of 'achronous' analysis, for obvious reasons, is quite abstract, but it can be proven correct, and is also capable of telling you what range of possible behaviours might occur. In a more real application, one might use this kind of technique to determine whether a particular unwanted case could ever possibly arise, such as (for example) an aircraft going outside its design parameters in response to incorrect pilot input. I know the people (at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris) who are doing exactly that kind of stuff for the Airbus flight software at the moment, using closely related techniques. I also know people at NASA using it to validate the flight software for the Mars Exploration Rover project (aka Spirit & Opportunity), so this is all actually quite current and happening stuff.