Re: Namespace: what's the correct usage?

["W. E. Perry" <wperry@fiduciary.com>]

John Cowan wrote:

> <flame>
> I asked you once before how any processor that receives messages whose
> sender intended "counterparty" to be a counterparty, and "sprice" to
> be a settlement price, and interpreted them in precisely the opposite
> senses, could possibly count as a sensible (i.e. non-Byzantine) member
> of the network.
>
> What you are emitting is blatant This-Or-Nothingism: i.e., because not
> every detail of the pragmatic interpretation of a message is constant
> from node to node, nothing but the bare surface syntax is.  This is
> another version of Humpty Dumpty's interpretation of "glory" as
> "a nice knock-down argument", and is self-evidently absurd.
> </flame>

Hi John.

You ignored my answer once before: My processor may well be able to do something
useful (within, as always, its own frame of reference) by taking your 'counterparty'
element or field as the basis for instantiating its own 'settlement price' data. In
fact, I have designed a system, now in *production*, which happens to correspond to
your example. In that system, a comparison ticket is considered (by the processing
node in question, which happens to perform P&S functions) to be definitive for
establishing execution counterparty, but not for computing settlement price (which,
not so incidentally may be in a different currency, or in different terms--free, DVP,
etc.--than those that the terms of the execution, taken alone, might imply). Upon
receipt of the comparison, the provisional counterparty can be definitively
established and the processing then required to compute the money terms of settlement
can be initiated (most likely by another node, or nodes, specifically suited to that
task). So, in this example, the element which you, as sender, intended to convey
'counterparty' was, in the salient point of my processing, the very basis for
instantiating 'settlement price', while your 'settlement price' element was not
something that my processor could (under its own rules of operation) do anything
useful with, no matter how much you might insist that I take it as the 'settlement
price' for my purposes.

Apologies to the list for all of the inside baseball on back-office settlement
operations, but it is rare for me to see a strawman in argument which actually
corresponds to the empirical data of a case which demonstrates the opposite of what
the strawman purports. My simple point is this:  my processor is autonomous and may be
immune to your 'intent'. What we share is the syntax of a document. If I can--for my
own autonomous purposes--do something useful by processing that document in a way
which you never expected, I am not only free to do so, but doing so is the perfect
expression of my expertise in my own particular (processing) specialty.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry