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I think Jeff conveys the wrong sense of idempotence. He has somehow extracted the purely mathematical sense, while the source he quotes goes on to explain the
by jcromartie 18y ago
I think Jeff conveys the wrong sense of idempotence. He has somehow extracted the purely mathematical sense, while the source he quotes goes on to explain the programming angle.
- gamache 18y agoYeah, I had never heard 'idempotence' used in a mathematical sense before. I just think of that as a function hitting a fixed point.
- newt0311 18y agoMathematically: For a map m from set A to itself (it is trivially obvious why this must be the case), we have m(m(x)) = m(x) for all x in A. Unfortunately, programming is nowhere this clean (unless you happen to work with haskell...)