I was reading grinders reply to TIEOWTTI where he said

Another aspect of this debate is orthogonality. The word gets bandied about a lot, and I'm not sure everyone agrees on what it means, I'm not sure I even understand it myself. But what it means for me is that something you pick up in one corner of the language can successfully be applied to another part of the language... and it will work! Perl excels at this sort of thing, like the notion of the last expression in a block is returned, and lazy evaluation and what not.

This got me thinking because if I had been asked what orthogonality is I would have a used a mathematically based description, probably something like

In math it means that two lines are perpandicular to each other, which means that if those lines are seen as representing variables then those variables are independant. In computing this idea of independance is extended into the abstract realm and means that two ideas or solutions are independant to each other. This sense is usually used when a programmer wants to indicate that some algorithm or solution is independant of another to the extent that changes to one should in way affect the other.

But as grinder said im not so sure if this a common understanding or that I even have it correct.

What do the monks at large think is orthogonality and how would you explain it or define it if you needed to?

Yves / DeMerphq
---
Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.

In reply to (OT) On Orthogonality by demerphq

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.