On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Hagar Delest <hagar.del...@laposte.net> wrote:
> Le 10/02/2013 21:34, Rob Weir a écrit :
>
>> This is NOT a complex math problem. It is trivial one, with three
>> perfectly valid answers. Debating among them is merely a time-wasting
>> form of bikeshedding. Everyone and his little sister has an opinion
>> on 0^0.
>
>
> Then you should update the wiki page to make clear what should be the
> correct result (undefined or 1).
>
>
>
>> The real problem is this: once we have adopted a convention for this
>> debatable expression, under what conditions do we change the
>> convention and break comptibility? Any other formulation of the
>> question is missing the essence of this decision.
>
>
> If this is a simple problem with a simple answer, then there is no need of
> convention at all. Just put the correct result.
>
The error in your thinking is to persist in arguing that there is only
one correct answer. That is false. I can point to mathematical
authorities of great reputation to argue for any of three answers. The
question is whether we change from the correct answer we give in AOO
3.4.1 and before to a different correct answer, and in doing so break
compatibility.
Let me show you how lame this argument is. What is sqrt(4)? 2,
right? Well, that is one convention. -2 is also a valid answer.
Would you be OK if we changed the code to return -2? What about an
error message because it is ambiguous? Of course, not, because we
adopt the convention to return the positive root only.
>From linguistics, what is the value of =lower("Σ") (capital Greek
sigma). There are two forms of lower case sigma, one used only in
final word position, another used elsewhere. So the question is
ambiguous. There is no single correct answer. So we adopt a useful
answer by convention. Should we instead return an error in that case,
arguing that a user should be avoiding asking such questions of sigma,
and should code more complex logic to handle this edge case? Of
course not. We try to avoid returning error values where there is a
reasonable convention we can adopt.
-Rob
> Hagar
