Re: Bug report in length of simple table

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 9:11 AM, Viacheslav Usov <via.usov@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 4:56 PM, Peter Aronoff <telemachus@arpinum.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Yay, bikeshedding. “edge” seems fine to me, but “threshold” less so. It
>> makes me think of crossing doors and gates into something else. (I.e. it has
>> the same problem for me that you had with “border”.) Perhaps “limit” or
>> “boundary”. (You may feel “boundary” is pretty much “border”, but I see it
>> more as the limit, rather than an area with action on either side.)
>
> Bikeshedding indeed.
>
> I should mention that boundary, in mathematics, is a set of points (not just
> one point), and the boundary of a set is not necessarily within the set. So
> the use of "boundary" does not seem appropriate to denote one point which is
> always in that set. Some researchers use "frontier" for the same purpose,
> and both "border" and "edge" are close enough to "boundary" in their
> colloquial use; I would say all of these are not very good names.
>
> I do not know why I dislike "threshold", it just sounds weird in this
> context, but I am not a native speaker.
>
> The term that I like would be the "terminator" (as used in astronomy). Or,
> perhaps, the "terminus" or the "terminal".
>
> Cheers,
> V.

"Terminus" is a synonym I had considered when making my suggestions.
"Terminator" is reasonable in that it terminates a consecutive run of
numerically-indexed data.

"Terminal" has too many other existing meanings in the field. :P

/s/ Adam