3 ms·
Your defense boils down to people having an insufficient understanding of zero as an ordinary number, and still clinging to the concept that zero means "nothing
by codeflo 3y ago
Your defense boils down to people having an insufficient understanding of zero as an ordinary number, and still clinging to the concept that zero means "nothing" or is otherwise magic.
This hints at a failure of math education.
As an analogy, many (usually, but not always, weaker) programmers still have magic ideas about booleans and comparison operators, and write nonsensical stuff like if (a == true). When you ask them, it's invariably that in their mind, there's mystic connection between comparison operators and if statements.
- travisjungroth 3y ago> Your defense I literally… never mind.
- codeflo 3y agoHa ha, I didn't even realize this when I typed the answer. I hope it was clear that I didn't mean to imply this was your personal opinion.
- travisjungroth 3y agoIt wasn’t clear then, but I can certainly see how you’d mean it that way. It was “mine” as in “I brought it”.
- eru 3y ago> When you ask them, it's invariably that in their mind, there's mystic connection between comparison operators and if statements. It doesn't have to be mystic. It's perfectly fine to design a language that works like this. It wouldn't be a good language, but it would be possible. Just like PHP didn't use to support constructs like `f(10)[2]`, that used to be a syntax error. So you needed something like `x = f(10);` first, before accessing `x[2]`. If you saw that kind of construction with the intermediate variable, you might also accuse the programmer of imagining mystic connections.