A List of One.

  • Thread starter =?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?=
  • Start date
N

Neredbojias

To further the education of mankind, Toby Inkster
1000 was just for the purposes of illustration. The array could
equally be stored at address 0, or 6, or 21890 -- it's not a matter
for the programmer to worry unduly about -- compilers tend to do a
pretty good job of slotting tonnes of integers, strings, arrays, etc
into memory with very little free space in between.

Sure, I don't dispute that point. I think we're actually talking about 2
different levels of programmers here, anyway. My criticism was generally
directed at those programmers who do things "expediently" rather than
thoroughly and properly. A short while ago some kind of wp files were
being discussed wherein you could save a single word and still have
something like a 12k file on disc. I happen to know Wordstar never really
made the transition from DOS to Windows for that very reason.
 
N

Neredbojias

To further the education of mankind, dorayme
If something exists that can have a causal effect then,
naturally, it exists. However, if you are admiring some
philosopher for suggesting that something that does not exist can
have a causal effect, you better be careful.

-Er, no, just the opposite.
The absence of money in your pocket can get you into real trouble
on a bus when the conductor comes to collect the fare.

Over here you have to pay first.
Its non-existence, however, is not really having a causal effect.
There is no money to do this. What is having an effect is your
failure to pay the conductor. That failure is plain to see.
Nothing non-existent or potential about that.

Well, money exists; you (-I?) just don't have any.
On the other hand you might want to say that the mere possibility
of winning the lottery is cause for you to buy a ticket. After
the draw, you don't win but you might have. The potentiality had
a causal effect. But you need to be careful before swallowing
this whole: what caused you to buy the ticket may just have been
you thinking (rightly) that you could have won. You thinking this
is a brain process that exists and can obviously have effects.
This is quite different to the mere possibility causing things.
Remember, smart people tend not to buys lottery tickets, it is a
bad bet.

It's not a bad bet when the purse accumulates to a level beyond the break-
even ratio of the odds.
 
N

Neredbojias

To further the education of mankind, dorayme
<[email protected]> declaimed:

....
Why depress us all, Adrienne? It is more comforting to think
there is some limit, a floor to our mortal deficiencies.

I am usually comforted more by dreaming there are no limits to anything.
 
A

Adrienne Boswell

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed dorayme
"there are things that you do not know...."

Like that there is an island called Tasmania.

And further, you are suggesting, you may not know that you do not
know that there is an island called Tasmania.

And when shall we stop? Is it then the case that you do not know
that you do not know that you do not know...

In other words, is ignorance something quite bottomless?

Why depress us all, Adrienne? It is more comforting to think
there is some limit, a floor to our mortal deficiencies.

On the contrary, it's nice to know that there are things you don't know
that you don't know. These are sometimes the wild solutions to problems
you think would never work, but for some reason they do. These are the
times you slap your forhead and wonder why you didn't think of that
before (because you didn't know you didn't know). But, the point is,
that you did think of it, because you really DID know it all along.
 
J

Jose

A short while ago some kind of wp files were
being discussed wherein you could save a single word and still have
something like a 12k file on disc. I happen to know Wordstar never really
made the transition from DOS to Windows for that very reason.

Microsoft Word is more compact?

Jose
 
D

dorayme

Adrienne Boswell said:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed dorayme


On the contrary, it's nice to know that there are things you don't know
that you don't know. These are sometimes the wild solutions to problems
you think would never work, but for some reason they do. These are the
times you slap your forhead and wonder why you didn't think of that
before (because you didn't know you didn't know). But, the point is,
that you did think of it, because you really DID know it all along.

It may be nice to know there are things you don't know. Not being
a god can please some people. But you are saying it is nice to
know that there are things you don't know that you don't know. I
am not quite sure how this might please a being? Or quite what it
means. There may well be things that you do not think you know
but which you do in fact know. This is something different. You
are not confusing the two are you?
 
N

Neredbojias

Microsoft Word is more compact?

I don't know much about word-processors since I insist on using only text-
editors for anything and everything, and I suspect that MS Word is quite
"bloating" in its own right, but WS for Windows was horrible. I remember
playing with it and building-up a 384k file with just a handful of
paragraphs.
 
J

Jukka K. Korpela

dorayme said:
Using 0-9 is just a way of counting (saves having to use "10"), I
would not draw too many deep conclusions from it Boji.

The reason for starting indexing from 0 in most programming languages is that
at the level of machine-language implementation, indexing is a matter of
adding the index value, possibly multiplied by a constant, to a base address.
We can consider this at a more logical level, too: we could _define_ an
indexed variable as a shorthand for adding a displacement. In C terms,
a is equivalent to *(a+i), thanks to indexes starting from zero.

This is also reflected in HTML. In client-side image maps, the coordinate
values used in <area> elements are indexes in a sense, and they start from
zero, i.e. the upper left corner of the image is (0,0).

Astonishingly, the HTML 4.01 specification "Errata" says:

"15. It is not specified whether the values of the "coords" attribute (A and
AREA elements) are 0-based or 1-based
Added: 12 May 2001
Type: Error
Refers to: 24 Dec 1999 version, section 13.6.1 AREA element declaration.
Description: The specification is unclear about whether x,y coordinates are
0-based or 1-based. Is the top left corner (0,0) or (1,1)?
Correction: None yet (seeking HTML WG input)."

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html4-updates/errata

After about five years, they still haven't decided on this. This confusion is
quite unnecessary, since starting from (0,0) is the only sensible way, and
the examples in the specification make it clear that (0,0) shall it be.
 
?

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?=

dorayme arranged shapes to form:
This is quite not quite so, davmon. I have outlined why in
another reply...

can't see it! where? Unless you're suggesting that a list is the same thing
as an array or a set...
 
?

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?=

Neredbojias arranged shapes to form:
In a more logical design, empty lists might be allowed as a
placeholder for a list, or as a construct that will dynamically be
transformed to a non-empty list by adding list items. But browsers
(and other interested parties) would then have to be prepared to
handling empty lists meaningfully.

I agree 100% with your rationale, and 0% with the conculsion! MathML
might well allow empty [set] definitions if they are useful to maths,
but the idea of empty lists doesn't seem logical at all to language or
document mark-up.

In computer-related languages, the first thing is usually the "0" thing.
Javascript, for example, numbers the initial item in the images array (-and
all arrays) "0". It can be argued that a zero item should be an empty item
but the logical fact is that even an empty item is one part of the set of
"whatever" selected from all possible parts of the set of "whatever". An
empty list is conceptually still a list if originally defined so and not
nothing (-using the double negative in its correct form.)


Ok, so say you've got an array in PHP, Perl, Javascript or whatever, and
you're going to output it to HTML. If the array is empty - should we output
nothing at all because there is no list, or output <ul></ul> to denote that
the set is there?
 
?

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?=

Davémon arranged shapes to form:
dorayme arranged shapes to form:


can't see it! where? Unless you're suggesting that a list is the same thing
as an array or a set...

oh, there it is, the shopping list...
 
?

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?=

Jose arranged shapes to form:
Early pentiums.

Consider a script which generates an HTML page listing bus riders. Each
time somebody swipes a farecard to enter or exit, the list is updated.
One day halfway through the run, the last passenger exits. Three
stops later, a passenger is waiting, and a stop after that five
passengers are waiting for the bus.

What happens to the bus, and to the unordered list of passengers, in the
interim. Does it simply cease to exist?

As Descartes might say, "I think not".

Then Descartes would output an empty <ul></ul> and fill his html with
codejunk?
 
?

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?=

Toby Inkster arranged shapes to form:
Does make sense to me.

<p>My current to do list is:</p>
<ul></ul>

conveys more meaning than:

<p>My current to do list is:</p>

which merely seems like an incomplete statement.

Both are incomplete statements.

Surely, in preference you'd have something like

<p>My current to do list is empty!</p>

or even:

<p>My current to do list is:</p>
<ul>
<li>Update to do list</li>
</ul>
;-)
 
?

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?=

dorayme arranged shapes to form:
This is quite misleading and vague I am afraid.

No it ain't! The point is that maths lacks the ability to be emphatic and
colloquial and so treating language as if it behaves like maths is, imho,
barking up the wrong tree in understanding lists.
This is because ordinary language is (usefully) vague. But you
need to be a bit careful. Two lists can contains the same items
but in different orders yet be the same: imagine a mother gives
her child a list of things to buy, he loses it and she writes the
list out again. It is the same list for all intents and purposes,
the fact that a couple of items are in a different order is not
important enough to make it an essentially different list.

Yet both lists retain an implied order, the order may be different and
arbitary to the author, but not to the reader:

A particually dilligent, and unconfident shopper (such as a child who loses
things often and is trying to be extra specially good...) might tick off,
in sequence, each item on the list in turn to make sure they get it, thus
the order of the list could add significant time to an otherwise reasonably
short trip. If the items were listed in order of a pre-planned route around
the supermarket the shopper might more quickly find each item quicker, and
if they were ordered alphabetically they'd be able to plan their own route,
but more quickly find the objects on the list etc. etc.
If 500
people list their equal favourite 3 films and all write the same
films, their lists are the same.

The statistics you conclude from them may be the same, but the lists won't
be. It's possible you could find a statistical correlation between their
order, and add to your sum of knowledge regarding peoples selection of top
3 films.
It all depends on context. The notion of a ul and an ol is a
refinement, a clarification, a canonical logical representation
of the possibilities in this area.

I agree that context creates meaning. A list isn't a meer representation of
possibilities, it is a defined, selected order of those possibilities.
Whether the ordering is intentionally arbitary or not, doesn't stop the
implication of an order being inherent to the form - even if it is meerly
'read it in this sequence', or 'you're familiar with this type of sequence
so you'll find it easy to scan through' and not 'this object is more
important than this other object'.
 
D

dorayme

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?= said:
Toby Inkster arranged shapes to form:


Both are incomplete statements.

No, TI is right.

You need to distinguish between the semantic effect of the two.
One is incomplete. The other is not. In the one, one can see
there is nothing to be done. In the other, one is waiting for the
speaker or writer to go on and complete the sentence. One has a
whole meaning, the other is incomplete in meaning.

Anyway, that is how I see it, but I appreciate some will not find
this so comfortable. I like and feel comfortable with empty sets.
It truly helps in handling the mad existential claims of the
majority of earthlings... :)
 
D

dorayme

Jukka K. Korpela said:
... also reflected in HTML. In client-side image maps, the coordinate
values used in <area> elements are indexes in a sense, and they start from
zero, i.e. the upper left corner of the image is (0,0).

snip

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html4-updates/errata

After about five years, they still haven't decided on this. This confusion is
quite unnecessary, since starting from (0,0) is the only sensible way, and
the examples in the specification make it clear that (0,0) shall it be.

I agree it is very sensible. Measuring almost anything, it is
most natural and practical to start at 0.

In Sudoku, where there are but ten kinds of (any type of) things,
it is particularly sensible to use 0-9. It has the elegance of
each item being quite unique and of similar size ("10" being
bigger than "9" in look and, furthermore, a composite of "0" and
"1" which, potentially confusedly, repeats elements already
used). In this example, there are just ten items and no
particular order, 0 is neither the first nor the tenth. Not in
Sudoku at least.
 
N

Neredbojias

Neredbojias arranged shapes to form: ....


Ok, so say you've got an array in PHP, Perl, Javascript or whatever,
and you're going to output it to HTML. If the array is empty - should
we output nothing at all because there is no list, or output <ul></ul>
to denote that the set is there?

What is output is irrelevant to the discussion. Sometimes you may wish to
have a list populated with "0"s, sometimes not. The significant thing is
that the array, even if empty, is defined and, hence, exists.
 
J

Jose

Then Descartes would output an empty said:
codejunk?

Were it me, to output an empty list, I would output <ul></ul>. This is
not codejunk, since there is a list there (it just happens to be empty).
Codejunk in this case would be <li></li><li></li>

However even that would not be codejunk if we were listing each seat and
the passenger that is sitting thereupon. An empty seat would get
<li></li> and a full seat would get <li><Davémon</li>

Jose
 

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