Word for "order doesn't matter"


You have some data and some code that operates on it. The order in which you process each data element doesn't matter, and hence the task is parallelizable.


The order of computation on each element doesn't matter, or the computation is ____ (not parallelizable!)



Answer



We've got a lot of pseudo-synonyms here. For the heck of it, I'll try to relate them.


The term that describes the notion of unimportance of order is (unequivocally, in my mind) sequence-independence. A set of operations that are all orthogonal are (in other words) independent and therefore sequence-independent. A function over a sequence for which the order of the sequence is immaterial is commutative. If the function consists of a fold of another function of lower arity, then the latter must be associative. Sequence-independent operations are parallelizable and can therefore be run asynchronously. You can also say that the function has unspecified evaluation order, which implies unreliable evaluation order, which is something you really ought to document.


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