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It's the oldest known land animal in modern times. For example, a tortoise could have lived a couple thousand years ago and lived a couple hundred years. The p
by mfer 5y ago
It's the oldest known land animal in modern times.
For example, a tortoise could have lived a couple thousand years ago and lived a couple hundred years. The people of that time may have known about it over the generations. Yet, we today have no record.
"ever" is said a lot but it's hard to substantiate.
- moron4hire 5y ago"That we know of" is implicit.
- TremendousJudge 5y agoexplicit is better than implicit
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 5y agoJesus Christ, this Hyper Text Markup Language page served via the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol over a Transmission Control Protocol connection can be so tiring sometimes.
- toss1 5y agoOf course you want to explicitly initialize all your variables and specify contexts in a programming language. In a natural language, implicit and contextual cues are often more important (and can be lost in low bandwidth communication media like this).
- setgree 5y agoAn article can be as high-bandwidth as it needs to be to communicate clearly... When I read > He turns 190 years old this year, making him the world’s oldest tortoise to ever live I don't hear an implicit "known" in that. I hear a claim about Jonathan's being the oldest tortoise to ever live, and we have no idea if that's true.
- toss1 5y agoNice example of where it is lost in lower context environments. Most people probably just take it at face value, or read it as implied in the limitations of the medium. I passingly notice the discrepancy but disregard it as unimportant in this context. You seem to deeply notice the discrepancy and complain that it isn't fixed every time, preferring always verbose precision over brevity. In a live-in-person context, it'd be easily handled in seconds of conversation or just body language and intonation. That's all lost here.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoThat's why many linguists consider written English and spoken English to be two different languages. “Attempting to transcribe spoken English? Yeah. Try transcribing that.”
- setgree 5y agoI am sensitive to claims that we know more than we do, it is true. A lot of this is pandemic-related; I see a lot of claims about what we know about the virus that seem totally uncalibrated to the strength of the evidence, and in that context, sloppy/overconfident thinking/expression has actual consequences.
- another-dave 5y agoThough you left your reasons why you think so implied ;)
- kazinator 5y agoSmartly implemented, documented implicit with test cases and air-tight semantics beats irksomely verbose and repetitive explicit. Moving a return value into the EAX register yourself is more explicit; I don't see a lot of Python code doing that sort of thing.