I'm not sure it's any better than my attempt; it has that "people's eyes
will glaze over" feel to it.
On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 9:50 PM Mark Devine <m...@markdevine.com> wrote:
> Kudos to the Benevolent Dictator!
>
> I'll have to loop over this a few times, but it's a blast...
>
> Mark
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Larry Wall <la...@wall.org>
> Sent: Friday, September 28, 2018 21:28
> To: ToddAndMargo <toddandma...@zoho.com>
> Cc: perl6-users@perl.org
> Subject: Re: Could this be any more obscure?
>
> On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 03:50:31PM -0700, ToddAndMargo wrote:
> : On 9/27/18 12:40 AM, Laurent Rosenfeld via perl6-users wrote:
> : > > I am NOT asking it to limit my request to Infinity.
> : >
> : >Yes you are, implicitly. If you don't pass any parameter for
> : >$limit, $limit will take the default value supplied by the
> : >signature, i.e. Inf.
> :
> : True, but that is not what the manual says Inf is. Lower in this
> : thread I made a suggest addition to the wording of Inf. Would
> : you mind looking at it and offering your criticism?
>
> Why do you want to burden the definition of what something *is* with all
> the things you can *do* with it? The former is tractable, while the latter
> is not.
>
> It seems to me that you are applying a different standard to human and
> computer languages here. In both human and computer languages, what
> something *is* has little to do with what something *does*. These are
> different abstraction levels. You're fine with this in English, so trying
> to flatten out all the abstraction levels is tending to work against your
> understanding of computer languages here, I suspect.
>
> The word "knife" is a noun, but if I "knife" someone, I'm using a noun
> (what the word is) as a verb (what the word can do). Human language is
> full of these borrowings of abstraction level, so much so that linguists
> even have a name for them in general, the "emic vs etic" distinction.
> In non-linguistic terms, "what you said vs what you really meant".
> What it is, vs what it does.
>
> Originally these were coined on the phonetic vs phonemic level, so we see
> lots of places in English where the phonetics don't match up with how they
> are used:
>
> The prince made some prints.
>
> Here you pronounce those words identically on a phonetic level, but on a
> higher phonemic level (or even on a morphophonemic level), "prince" is only
> one morpheme, while "prints" is two morphemes "print" and the plural "s".
> But this etic/emic distinction works at higher levels as well:
>
> Here's a you-can-even-use-a-sentence-as-an-adjective example.
>
> Here the etic description of "you-can-even-use-a-sentence-as-an-adjective"
> is that of a sentence. That's what it *is*. But language is flexible
> enough that I can choose (emically) to slot the whole sentence in as a
> adjective. That's what the sentence can *do*. (Or that's what you can do
> with a sentence, if you prefer.) The fact that you can do this takes
> nothing away from what a sentence *is*, because that's at a lower
> abstraction level.
>
> Going up the linguistic stack even further, every time you read a metaphor
> in a poem (or in a newspaper article for that matter), you are using your
> knowledge of English to realize that the poet (or reporter) is relying on
> you, the Gentle Reader, to realize that the writer is using a metaphor. A
> metaphor is when you say one thing but mean something else by it. The
> words of a metaphor are what it "is", but the meaning it produces in your
> brain is what it "does".
>
> The fact that the $limit is using a particular value with a particular
> representation in memory ("what the manual says Inf is") has almost nothing
> to do with how we choose to use it metaphorically in an interface, except
> insofar as it's extremely convenient to have a floating-point value that
> happens to compare as larger than any integer you want to name.
> That comparison is a thing that Inf can *do*, which is the abstraction
> level on which the $limit API is working. The fact that it can be used
> this way is not at all contradictory to the description of what the Inf
> value *is*.
>
> But the description of what it can do really belongs on the many places
> where it can be used in various metaphorical ways, not in the definition of
> what it is. The floating-point Inf value really has no clue whatsoever
> about all the ways it might be used. It probably doesn't even realize it
> can be compared with an integer. :)
>
> Larry
>
--
brandon s allbery kf8nh
allber...@gmail.com
