5 ms·
You seem to think that I'm arguing that collisions might be a problem. I'm not. I'm raising a point of English usage. "Unique" is not the right word to use i
by pklausler 9y ago
You seem to think that I'm arguing that collisions might be a problem. I'm not. I'm raising a point of English usage. "Unique" is not the right word to use in this context; "distinct" is correct.
If a set has a single member, that member is unique; e.g., 2 is the unique even prime number.
If a thing is different from all other things, it's distinct.
- Gracana 9y ago> You seem to think that I'm arguing that collisions might be a problem. To be fair, your short original post left readers free to guess at which unnecessarily pedantic point you were trying to make.
- dchest 9y agoHuh? From the set of all possible linked OpenBSD kernels (2^number_of_dot_o_files), the kernel you re-link is unique. And distinct, too.
- jwilk 9y agoIt's n!, which is much bigger than 2^n.
- dchest 9y agoThanks for correction.
- pklausler 9y agoI think that you're not catching my point, and recommend that you look up the word "unique" in a good dictionary, preferably of mathematics. (It's tautological and uninformative to say that any x is the unique member of the set of things equal to x. And it's simply incorrect to say that any member of a set with multiple elements is unique wrt that set.)