The Need for Clear Definitions In any scientific discipline there are many reasons to use terms that have precise definitions. Understanding the terminology of a discipline is essential to learning a subject and precise terminology enables us to communicate ideas clearly with other people. In computer science the problem is even more acute: we need to construct software and hardware components that must smoothly interoperate across interfaces with clients and other components in distributed

more »

... ems. The definitions of these interfaces need to be precisely specified for interoperability and good systems performance.