NOT.Preface:6 - Consequences and Architectural Rationale

This repertoire makes the expression and its interpretation available for deliberate work. Practitioners can expose a tacit step, preserve a useful rewrite, return from a lossy summary, coordinate complementary forms or redesign an expensive operation. They can hand a named contribution to another person or computational agent without assuming that the receiving agent reconstructs the same conventions unaided.

The organization follows operations across media. A catalogue organized by mathematical symbols, programming languages, diagrams, music and dance is valuable for finding established conventions. It would repeat several design problems here while hiding their common structure. Conversely, imposing one universal notation would sacrifice distinctions or useful operations of particular practices. The selected methods support reuse of existing notations and construction of differences where the receiving work needs them.

Formation, interpretation and transformation have distinct results. A well-formed expression can still lack an interpretation; an interpreted expression can lack an effective evaluation algorithm; a valid result can be expressed in a form that makes its revision difficult. Keeping those questions separate lets their methods connect without crediting syntax for a mathematical proof, a computational construction or a performer’s preparation.

Translation and coordination also differ. A one-way translation may deliberately discard information irrelevant to its receiver. Continued joint use needs correspondence and an update policy, sometimes retaining several noninterchangeable accounts. Redesign then asks whether the resulting reading and editing operations justify their combined burden. NOT.8 specializes these operations where temporal or embodied carriers change the references and access conditions; it does not make every notation a performance score.

The two Parts group this presentation. They do not prescribe an order of work or imply that all eight methods are parts of every project. A narrower mathematical, programming or performance profile can reuse several bodies and add the rules peculiar to its practice. Such a profile must state which new operation or distinction it adds. The present language provides no complete grammar for every subject and no general theory of perception or learning.