Am Freitag 08 Mai 2009 13:23:09 schrieb Wolfgang Jeltsch: > Am Donnerstag, 7. Mai 2009 14:42 schrieb Daniel Fischer: > > Of course, if centuries ago people had decided to write the argument > > before the function, composition would've been defined the other way > > round. They haven't. > > Algebraists used to write x f instead of f(x) at least in the 1980s.
I think that should read *some* algebraists... Though I had no contact with algebraists in the 1980s, if that practice had been ubiquitous among them, I would have expected it to show up in the textbooks. I've never seen it in an algebra book, nor was it used in any algebra lecture I attended in the 1990s, so I doubt it was very widespread. Don't get me wrong, that notation does make sense and has some advantages over the conventional one, I wouldn't oppose a change, though it would take some time to get used to it. All I'm saying is that the overwhelming majority of mathematicians doesn't use it. > I think, also category theorists often wrote (write?) composition with the > first morphism on the left, i.e., “the other way round”. Yeah, I heard that, too. It's a field where the advantages of postfix notation show clearly and a young one, so for them it was relatively easy to switch. You'd have a hard time persuading the statisticians and analysts, though. > > Best wishes, > Wolfgang Cheers, Daniel _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
