Assignment: Cross-Cutting Symptom Measures

Assignment: Cross-Cutting Symptom Measures

Permalink: 

There are many pros and cons in relation to mental health diagnosis.   List some in supporting an argument for or against formal diagnostic   protocols. Briefly explain the cross-cutting symptom measures in the   DSM. Include at least two scholarly references.

Guideline 11: “Limit the number of language elements.” A language which has several hundreds of elements is obviously hard to understand. One approach to limit the number of elements in a language for complex domains is to design sublanguages which cover different aspects of the systems. This concept is, e.g., employed by the UML: different kinds of diagrams are used for special purposes such as structure, behavior, or deployment. Each of them has its own notation with a limited number of concepts.

A further possibility to limit the number of elements of a language is to use libraries that contain more elaborated concepts based on the concepts of the basic language and that can be reused in other models. Elements which were previously defined as part of the language itself can then be moved to a model in the library (compare, e.g., I/O in Pascal vs. C++). Furthermore, users can extend a library by their own definitions and thus, can add more and more functionality without changing the language structure itself. Therefore, introducing a library leads to a flexible, extensi- ble, and extensive language that nevertheless is kept simple. On the other hand, a language capable of library import and definition of those elements must have a number of ap- propriate concepts embedded to enable this (e.g., method and class definitions, modularity, interfaces – whatever this means in the DSL under construction). This principle has successfully been applied in GPL design where the languages are usually small compared to their huge standard libraries.

Guideline 12: “Avoid conceptual redundancy.” Redun- dancy is a constant source of problems. Having several con- cepts at hand to describe the same fact allows users to model it differently. The case of conceptual richness in C++ shows that coding guidelines then usually forbid a number of con- cepts. E.g., the concept of classes and structs is nearly iden- tical, the main difference is the default access of members which is public for structs and private for classes. There- fore, classes and structs can be used interchangeably within C++ whereas the slight difference might be easily forgot- ten. So, it should be generally avoided to add redundant concepts to a language.