Re: Proposal: 6NF

On Oct 11, 9:18 am, "vc" <boston..._at_hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That means that every
> > integer is also a real number; therefore, {2, 4, 7} is identical to {2.0,
> > 4.0, 7.0}. 2.0 and 2 are just possible representations of the same number,
>
> Obviously, it's not "the same number" only because, as one might have
> discovered in the secondary school, sqrt(2) and sqrt(2.0) would yield
> rather different results.

Hmmm. Well, I'm not sure that is how my secondary education went. I don't believe I had anything like type theory then, or anything like C. (I was programming in Basic and FORTRAN during my teens. :-)

In secondary school arithmetic, the square root function maps reals to reals, but I don't think anyone then would have found the idea of "sqrt(2)" remarkable. And I don't recall anything like 32 bit arithmetic. Certainly I learned what "div" (integer division) was later.  

Marshall Received on Thu Oct 12 2006 - 06:00:25 CEST