Sorry I've been away for a week, and sorry for quoting so much of Erik's note. It is unusual for me to disagree with virtually EVERY statement in such a large collection. Obviously we have different contexts for almost everything. Now I would not say "violent disagreement" because almost each point is trivial, yet wrong from my perspective.
On Saturday, August 9, 2014 7:35:13 PM UTC-7, Erik Massop wrote: > > On Fri, 8 Aug 2014 18:57:21 -0700 (PDT), rjf <fat...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > > > On Thursday, August 7, 2014 10:55:37 PM UTC-7, Robert Bradshaw wrote: > > > > > On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 9:02 AM, rjf <fat...@gmail.com <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > > > > On Wednesday, August 6, 2014 8:11:21 PM UTC-7, Robert Bradshaw > > > > wrote: > ... > > Just that for a mathematician to call something a field when it isn't > > would, I think, be a serious mistake. You seem to think that it is > > ok for a computer system to do so. I certainly agree that there are > > more important issues with floating point computation than the > > fact that these numbers do not constitute a real closed field. > > In my experience computer scientists are often more precise than > mathematicians. ) > Logicians, a subclass of mathematicians, tend to be precise. Computer scientists have to be precise when writing programs (or correct programs, anyway .) > > It seems quite common to me to (intentionally) confuse mathematical > objects with their imperfect realizations. For instance when I use my > compasses to draw something that looks a lot like a circle, I would call > what I drew a circle. Yet I am sure that the points that I drew do not > have equal distance to the center. > It is obvious that a picture of something resembling a circle is not a circle in the abstract, and there is no confusion. There IS a confusion if you have a bit arrangement in a computer word that you say is a canonical 2, and another bit arrangement in a computer word that differs and you say that is a canonical 2. More later. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
