Re: Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class (was: 'out-' affix in conlangs?)

On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:30:56 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

>To go back to the typecasting metaphor, the idea behind typecasting is
>that it represents the identity operation.  The copula, as it were.
>Sure, there are infinitely many functions that receive a character
>string as input and return a floating point number as output, but the
>"obvious" one that needs no qualification is the one that returns the
>"value" of the string - presumably the one it  would represent if
>entered as a numeric literal in the source code.
Call it too much mathematical hard-headedness, but if I'm gonna call things
identity functions I want them to be isomorphisms, and their compositions to
be identity functions as well.  And I doubt casting a random string to an
integer and back is ever going to preserve it in any sensible lang.

Ah, well, never said my thoughts on proglang design were non-fringe.

Alex