On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 7:23 PM, John Yeung<gallium.arsen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Paul LaFollette is probably thinking along the lines of formal logic > or set theory. It's a little bit confused because programming isn't > quite the same as math, and so it's a common question when designing > and implementing programming languages how far to take certain > abstractions. In some languages, nil, null, or none will try to > behave as mathematically close to "nothing" (complete absence of > anything) as possible, even though in reality they have to have some > concrete implementation, such as perhaps being a singleton object. > But mathematically speaking, it's intuitive that "nothing" would match > any type. I don't see why that would be the case. Something of the type "thingy" is ONE thingy. Nothing is ZERO thingies, so it is not something of the type "thingy". A car is a single car. Nothing is zero cars, which is not a car, just like two cars is not a car. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
