On Friday, August 25, 2017 at 8:39:25 AM UTC+5:30, Rustom Mody wrote: > On Friday, August 25, 2017 at 8:28:55 AM UTC+5:30, Ian wrote: > > On Aug 24, 2017 8:51 PM, "Larry Martell" wrote: > > > > On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 9:21 PM Rustom Mody wrote: > > > > > Statement 1: Aeroplanes fly > > > Statement 2: Submarines swim > > > > > > > > > Are these two statements equally acceptable? > > > > > > [Inspired by a talk by Noam Chomsky] > > > > There should be a corollary of Godwin's law for that idiot. > > > > > > Chomsky borrowed it from Dijkstra, I think. > > > > http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html > > I was about to start with the Dijkstra connection but then cut it because > irrelevant > However I find the two very different > I think Dijkstra's "Can a submarine swim?" is almost entirely a mockery of > the idea > However Chomsky's laconic juxtaposition points to the deep non-rational > programming in our subconscious mind of what we accept and what we dont > > [Larry seems to be angry about/at somethin'… No idea who/what…]
One more juxtaposition(s) to consider: In Fortran, Pascal the numerics were real and int(eger) In PL-1 it was Float and Fixed So a clear choice of underlying model on the one side and machine representation on the other It was only C onwards that we started seeing the strange juxtaposition - for int(eger) emphasize the (math) model - for real emphasize the float(ing) representation I vaguely remember someone (Niklaus Wirth??) criticizing this mis-juxtaposition In retrospect though I find it fine: - fixpoint numbers are ok representations of integers most of the time - floats as representations of reals are so leaky that remembering the difference sounds like a good idea Early in my python classes I show this: $ python Python 2.7.13 (default, Jan 19 2017, 14:48:08) [GCC 6.3.0 20170118] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> .1 + .1 == .2 True >>> .1 + .1 + .1 == .3 False >>> -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
