Carl Eastlund wrote: > Ken, I think you're missing John's point, and some crucial > mathematical terminology. "Real numbers" are a specific, proper > subset of the complex numbers - specifically, those without an > imaginary component. In this context, the terms "real", "imaginary", > and "complex" have nothing to do with their usual, non-technical > meaning. Saying that 2+3i isn't a real number doesn't mean that it > isn't a number.
Yes, and rather crucially, the complex field is not in general an ordered set. Certainly one may define an ordering upon it, but there is not a "standard" ordering like < for the reals. To quote wikipedia (if that may be permitted), "Unlike the reals, the set of complex numbers cannot be totally ordered in any way that is compatible with its arithmetic operations: C [,the complex numbers,] cannot be turned into an ordered field." Some actual attention to the mathematics is very much warranted here. But, this thread really doesn't belong on r6rs-discuss... Regards, Jon _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
