Few and easy to understand terms should be used consistently!

Unambiguous communication is surely a necessity for any project involving many people. Misunderstandings, caused by a proliferation of different words meaning the same thing and the same word meaning different things must be avoided. Instead, few, easy to understand and well defined terms should be used consistently by everyone. Obviously, this is not always the case in the world of software. Words like interface, package, synchronization, process, integer, and so on, may mean different things in different programming languages and technologies, and it is of course impossible to eliminate such ambiguities completely.

While commonly used terms have been adopted as far as possible in Obix, new and other terms have been introduced whenever this seemed to be necessary for better understanding. Two examples are:

• yes and no are the literal values for type yes_no, instead of true and false for type boolean


• integer8, integer16, integer32 and integer64, instead of byte, short, int, long