Discriminator

In computing, a discriminator is a field of characters designed to separate a certain element from others of the same identifier. As an example, suppose that a program must save two unique objects to memory, both of whose identifiers happen to be foo. To ensure the two objects are not conflated, the program may assign discriminators to the objects in the form of numbers; thus, foo (1) and foo (2) distinguish both objects named foo.

For other uses, see Constant fraction discriminator and Foster–Seeley discriminator.

This has been adopted by programming languages as well as digital platforms for instant messaging and massively multiplayer online games.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.