2 ms·

My pet peeve in English terminology is the very word "computer". It should have always been called something like "the mathematical machine", computation is jus

• dxdm 3y ago
  > computation is just one of them I always thought that, apart from moving bits around, computation (in the sense of performing calculations, like the people that used to be called "computers" before) is the only thing a computer actually does. It just so happens that the computations have many practical applications and results. I don't quite understand the versatility of "ordinateur" that you mention. Maybe it's because I only know a little bit of French (and a tiny speck of Latin), but it sounds like it refers to something that puts things in order, like sorting. And that seems to be only a subset of what computation can do. In short, I'm wondering how my interpretation of these words differs from yours.