Compatibility is a term used by geochemists to describe how elements partition themselves in the solid and melt within Earth's mantle. In geochemistry, compatibility is a measure of how readily a particular trace element substitutes for a major element within a mineral.

Chemical compatibility is a measure of how stable a substance is when mixed with another substance.Chemical compatibility chart safe/unsafe combinations If two substances can mix together and undergo a chemical reaction, they are considered compatible.

forward compatible

forward compatibility

forward compatible

<algorithm> (Or "message digest function") A {one-way function} which takes a variable-length message and produces a fixed-length hash. Given the hash it is computationally infeasible to find a message with that hash; in fact one can't determine any usable information about a message with that hash, not even a single bit. For some one-way hash functions it's also computationally impossible to determine two messages which produce the same hash. A one-way hash function can be private or public, just like an encryption function. MD5, SHA and Snefru are examples of public one-way hash functions. A public one-way hash function can be used to speed up a public-key digital signature system. Rather than sign a long message, which can take a long time, compute the one-way hash of the message, and sign the hash. {sci.crypt FAQ (ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/usenet/usenet-by-group/sci.crypt/)}. (2001-05-10)

Forward compatibility or upward compatibility is a design characteristic that allows a system to accept input intended for a later version of itself. The concept can be applied to entire systems, electrical interfaces, telecommunication signals, data communication protocols, file formats, and programming languages.

<jargon> The ability to accept input from later versions of itself. Forward compatibility is harder to achieve than {backward compatibility}, since, in the backward case, the input format is know whereas a forward compatible system needs to cope gracefully with unknown future features. An example of future compatibility is the stipulation that a web browser should ignore HTML tags it does not recognise. See also extensible. (2003-06-23)

A family of computer models is said to be compatible if certain software that runs on one of the models can also be run on all other models of the family. The computer models may differ in performance, reliability or some other characteristic.

<jargon> Able to share data or commands with older versions of itself, or sometimes other older systems, particularly systems it intends to supplant. Sometimes backward compatibility is limited to being able to read old data but does not extend to being able to write data in a format that can be read by old versions. For example, WordPerfect 6.0 can read WordPerfect 5.1 files, so it is backward compatible. It can be said that Perl is backward compatible with awk, because Perl was (among other things) intended to replace awk, and can, with a converter, run awk programs. See also: backward combatability. Compare: forward compatible. (2003-06-23)