4 ms·
Couldn't we find a nicer word for "idempotent"?
by dscrd 13y ago
Couldn't we find a nicer word for "idempotent"?
- daviddaviddavid 13y agoIndeed. It's a very clunky word, not least because it's unclear which syllable to stress. I've variously heard people say both i-dem-PO-tent and i-DEM-po-tent. (In the latter, the "o" in "po" gets reduced to a schwa.)
- riquito 13y agoSince when a noun pronounce should be obvious?
- msg 13y agoWhen I don't want to sound snooty, I say rerunnable. Fixed point is another way to get at it, although it requires your listener to know what that is.
- bmm6o 13y agoThe term is very well-established in mathematics (for e.g. matrices and transformations) that is the precisely correct term for this, and it is already widely used in CS. Inventing a new word would not be helpful in the long run.
- dscrd 13y agoI find a world where we're locked into using words mathematicians invent a very bleak one indeed.
- apalmer 13y agoWhat do you mean by 'nicer' word? I really honestly don't get it. I mean if it were some consumer property, like say the size of a hard drive or such, then yeah makes some sense, for a term used in strictly in technical circles to describe a precise technical property, I don't understand what 'nicer' means.