It has been claimed that connectionist methods of encoding compositional structures, as Pollack's recursive auto-associative memory (RAAM), support a non-classical form structure-sensitive operation known as 'holistic computation', where symbol structures be acted upon holistically without the need to decompose them, or to perform a search locate or access their constituents. In this paper, it is argued that the concept as described in the literature is vague and confused, and a revised definition of holistic computation proposed which aims to clarify the issues involved. It is also argued that holistic computation neither requires a highly distributed or holistic representation, nor is it unique to connectionist methods of representing compositional structure.