>> The main thing that I notice is that there is a heavy "bias" in >> academia towards mathematical models. > > Yeah wonderful observation. Lets clean up! > > If I have a loop: > > while i < len(a) and a[i] != x: > i++ > > I need to understand that at the end of the loop: > i >= len(a) or a[i] == x > and not > i >= len(a) and a[i] == x > nor > i == len(a) or a[i] == x # What if I forgot to initialize i?
You know in my world, we have what's called Input/Output, rather than punchcards or switchbanks where you come from. Why not: "print i,a[i]". Done! > Now why bother to teach students such a silly thing (and silly name) > as deMorgan? Well deMorgan falls into BooleanLogic which I'm arguing is distinct from the the mathematical realm where the lambda calculus wizards come from. So that's my camp, thanks. > So all hail to your project of cleaning up the useless math from CS. Yes, on useless math, no on *useful* math. Thanks. > And to whet your appetite for the grandeur and glory of your > visionings why not start with making music schools enroll tone-deaf > students? Why wasn't Beethoven deaf? Beethoven was deaf. > You need to study some history (or is that irrelevant like math?) > The Turing who invented the Turing machine in 1936 led the code- > cracking efforts of the allies a couple of years later. > Do you allow for the fact that he may have had abilities that were > common to both aka 'math' 'theory' etc? > Or do you believe that winning wars is a theoretical and irrelevant > exercise? Please, I don't dismiss math anymore than a number theorist might dismiss the realm of complex numbers. > Yes there is some truth in what you say. Just call it logic as object- > language (what you call logic-gates) and logic as meta-language ie > logic for reasoning Right, and I'm arguing that there hasn't been enough conceptual separation between the two. So why are you arguing? > Also good to study the views of one of the doyens of OOP: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stepanov#Criticism_of_OOP That's a very good reference. It voices some of my points that are in criticism of python's object architecture. -- MarkJ Tacoma, Washington -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list