On Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:25:28 +0100, John Yeung
<gallium.arsen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> But mathematically speaking, it's intuitive that
> "nothing" would match any type.
Completely wrong. The concept you're thinking of in
denotational semantics is called "bottom", but bottom
is not a value that functions can compute and return.
It is really the absence of a value.
I've never heard a mathematician use the term "bottom". It certainly
could be that I just haven't talked to the right types of
mathematicians. I'm not sure it's even relevant. "Denotational
semantics" is specific to computer science. My point was simply that
even an elementary understanding of mathematics (and I'll grant a
naive understanding of computer science as well) might lead someone to
think that it *might* make sense for None to be the name for nothing.
Such an understanding would be clearly wrong in the context in which we
were talking (and denotational semantics is a branch of category theory,
which is not specific to computer science if you don't mind). If None
is nothing, then it can't be a string, int, float or anything else,
because they're all something.
--
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses
--
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