3 ms·

> "A digraph is weakly connected if and only if cannot be divided into two nonempty parts" Is there an "it" missing here? (I wouldn't normally, but this is th

> "A digraph is weakly connected if and only if cannot be divided into two nonempty parts" Is there an "it" missing here? (I wouldn't normally, but this is the closest I'll ever come to finding a Professor Knuth mistake!)

klyrs 4y ago
Email him. I got a check for noticing some macro barf in a preprint.
- orlp 4y ago
  He doesn't have an email address. He accepts letters though: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
  - jhncls 4y ago
    Well, the article that is being discussed [0], mentions an "address for bug reports (taocp@cs.stanford.edu)". [0]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news22.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news22.html
  - password4321 4y ago
    Not quite. From that very page: > Email is a no-no EXCEPT for reporting errors in books.
    - orlp 4y ago
      I can't read apparently...
gerdesj 4y ago
OK manchestercalling it seems you've caught a pretty major grammatical error unprotected in the wild. Now, do you replace the second if with it or add an it post second if? "if and only if" is a standard and well understood term in our rather wooly language, so we will probably need your missing "it" to complete the sentence. Note that nothing was lost anyway - both you and I could see what was going on. English is pretty close to stripped to the waist and holding both fists up already. There isn't much left to remove for conciseness with clarity and unambiguity. I think we need to keep the pronouns but they can often be dropped with minimal loss of clarity. If we lost pronouns wholesale, we'd have to get pretty weird on suffixes or the like. Before you know it - you are speaking German or Dutch instead of our unholy brew of pretty much every language that has been seen on the continent and cuddled up to nearly every other language in the world. (The last time I saw JB in the flesh was 1977 when I was seven and lived in Wythenshawe for a year in between parental postings to exotic lands like W Germany - it looked like science fiction to me then and it still looks rather impressive now)

klyrs 4y ago

Email him. I got a check for noticing some macro barf in a preprint.

orlp 4y ago
He doesn't have an email address. He accepts letters though: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- jhncls 4y ago
  Well, the article that is being discussed [0], mentions an "address for bug reports (taocp@cs.stanford.edu)". [0]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news22.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news22.html
- password4321 4y ago
  Not quite. From that very page: > Email is a no-no EXCEPT for reporting errors in books.
  - orlp 4y ago
    I can't read apparently...

gerdesj 4y ago

OK manchestercalling it seems you've caught a pretty major grammatical error unprotected in the wild. Now, do you replace the second if with it or add an it post second if? "if and only if" is a standard and well understood term in our rather wooly language, so we will probably need your missing "it" to complete the sentence. Note that nothing was lost anyway - both you and I could see what was going on. English is pretty close to stripped to the waist and holding both fists up already. There isn't much left to remove for conciseness with clarity and unambiguity. I think we need to keep the pronouns but they can often be dropped with minimal loss of clarity. If we lost pronouns wholesale, we'd have to get pretty weird on suffixes or the like. Before you know it - you are speaking German or Dutch instead of our unholy brew of pretty much every language that has been seen on the continent and cuddled up to nearly every other language in the world. (The last time I saw JB in the flesh was 1977 when I was seven and lived in Wythenshawe for a year in between parental postings to exotic lands like W Germany - it looked like science fiction to me then and it still looks rather impressive now)