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totally readable to this lowly cse graduate. that said, the notation is overly verbose and specific, if you could have defined it in less rigorous notation(unle
by leecarraher 10y ago
totally readable to this lowly cse graduate. that said, the notation is overly verbose and specific, if you could have defined it in less rigorous notation(unless you truly needed it), more people would have understood and engaged in your presentation. Mathematics is a language like many others where the fundamental goal is to communicate ideas.
- pron 10y ago> the notation is overly verbose and specific That's what formal notation is like. The advantage of a formal notation is that it is both succinct and fully precise, and can, therefore, be used to perform formal proofs, possibly using a mechanical proof checker. Formal proofs are especially important in computer science, where theorems about programs are not mathematically deep but do have a lot of details that can be easily overlooked when reasoning informally. Lamport's talk was precisely about that: formal reasoning about algorithms. In that context, the ideas must not only need to be communicated so that they are intuitively or roughly understood -- as is good enough for math -- but made absolutely precise.
- leecarraher 10y agoas was part of the comment, unless "needed". Otherwise I've fallen into the trap of breaking out the most precise notation from the depths of the annals of mathematics to write slick looking, ultra concise pseudocode in latex (algorithm2e) for submissions to ieee and acm journals, and almost every time i get one or two reviewers saying that the notation is needlessly complex.
- pron 10y agoYes, but Lamport's talk was about formal specification and verification, and we're not talking some arcane stuff here: set membership and first order logic. CS graduates should know how to read that.