Re: 5.2 work3 manual

[Gavin Wraith <gavin@...>]

In message <30402746949D4728B99A2E5FB4C80C3B@Mania> you wrote:

> Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> >> I had not realized that # was not well defined
> >
> > # is certainly well defined; it's just not what most people expect it to
> > be
> > in the case of holes.
>
> Technically, I believe it is not. Whilst it has a definition, and it never
> returns a value that violates that definition, that it can return different
> values for two (as far as Lua can tell) identical tables means it's a
> "multivalued function", which is in the definition of "not well-defined" -
> at least according to wikipedia:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-definition. ;)

My initial posting was really about the language used in the manual.
What is in the manual is not a definition as I understand that term.
Giving a definition and giving a condition are by no means the
same thing; unless one can show first that something satisfies the
condition and second that two different things cannot both
satisfy it, a condition is not a definition.

In my book there is no such beast as a "multi-valued" function, only
one whose codomain has not been correctly specified.

What got me started was the use of the phrase
   "The .. is defined to be any ..".

That is not correct English syntax unless the referent is unique.
"A ... can be any .." or "The .. is defined to be the (unique) ..."
would be OK. My point is about the use of the definite or indefinite
articles in English, rather than what # actually does or should do.
Indeed, it was the formation of this sentence that led to my confusion
about what # was supposed to do. I am still not sure what the definition is.

-- 
Gavin Wraith (gavin@wra1th.plus.com)
Home page: http://www.wra1th.plus.com/