I disagree. If you remold a square piece of pastry dough into a circle you haven't "circled the square", you have destroyed the square entirely!
I don't quite get the army metaphor, but I don't think the relationship of "citizen" and "soldier" is analogous to that of "rectangle" and "square" or even "rectangle" and "rectangle with different dimensions".
>I disagree. If you remold a square piece of pastry dough into a circle you haven't "circled the square", you have destroyed the square entirely!
Well, the physical thing is all still there, just in a different shape.
You have destroyed only an abstract quality, it's squareness, not the thing.
So you haven't "destroyed it" entirely anymore than changing the width of an object to something equal or different than it's height its 'destroying" the object. It just sets a value for a field of the same struct in memory.
Whereas your argument was "A rectangle has a width and height, and you can't just will it to have a different width and height and expect it to obey you through some force of nature".
If by the rectangle you mean the abstract quality, then you're right, you can't.
But we're talking about an object in computer memory that's an instance of a square or a rectangle, or about some physical thing that is one or the other shape.
And if you mean those, then yes, you can very much will that object to a different width and height.
Which is the one of the distinctions TFA makes: the abstract quality can't change, but the thing that embodies that quality can change qualities (and, with them, attributes, like width and height).
> You have destroyed only an abstract quality, it's squareness, not the thing.
Here we are in agreement.
> But we're talking about an object in computer memory that's an instance of a square or a rectangle, or about some physical thing that is one or the other shape.
Everything in a computer program is an abstraction, and of course you can arrange these abstractions however you like. You could create an instance of a Square that inherits from Paper and has dimensions of "A8". I'm merely arguing that when building an object whose shape may change, using a PastryDough class is probably preferable to using one called Square.
Or when a citizen turns into a soldier -- an army camp is like a soldier factory/constructor. Hmm, how's that for a mixed metaphor?