INADA Naoki <songofacandy@gmail.com> writes:

I am one of translator of Python document. But I am not good at English well. I can't understand one sentence ...

...

This isn’t defined beyond that it is an upper bound on ratio(), and is faster to compute.

The word "bound" works like this: a "bound" or "boundary" means a limit or edge, so often it gets used in math like this: "I am not sure what the exact value of 'pi' is, but I have done some work and established a lower bound of 3.0 and an upper bound of 3.2 for its true value." This means, more simply, that 'pi' lies "between 3.0 and 3.2", but math people have the specific names "lower bound" and "upper bound" for the limits that they work out for the value of an unknown or difficult-to- compute number. So when 'quick_ratio()' claims to return an "upper bound on ratio()", it means that it returns a number that 'ratio()' is guaranteed to be "less than"; it sets, in other words, an upper limit on what the actual value of 'ratio()' might be. So if 'quick_ratio()' returns 0.8, it means that 'ratio()' itself might be 0.8, or 0.6, or 0.003, or 0.00062, or even 0; that is, it might be any permissible ratio value (they run from 0 to 1) that is not more than 0.8 because 'quick_ratio()' has done some checking and is sure that the actual 'ratio()' is less than or equal to 0.8. So did my English make the docs any clearer? Or am I just as confusing? :-) -- Brandon Craig Rhodes brandon@rhodesmill.org http://rhodesmill.org/brandon

Thank you, Branodn and Doug for quick reply! The word "upper bound" is also used in Japan with mathematics.

I think it means that the implementation of quick_ratio() is not defined in a lot of detail, except to say that the function will return a value that is an upper bound of the value returned by ratio().

That's the answer I wanted!! I've got "This isn't defined beyond that" means "This method is not defined in detail more than". I've misread that "beyond" means "over the upper bound". Maybe, "more" is easier than "beyond" for non-native English readers. Thank you very well. -- INADA Naoki <songofacandy@gmail.com>

Doug Hellmann wrote:

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I've got "This isn't defined beyond that" means "This method is not defined in detail more than".

I've misread that "beyond" means "over the upper bound". Maybe, "more" is easier than "beyond" for non-native English readers.

I agree that the current English phrasing is confusing to non-native speakers. You should open a ticket in the tracker and ask for that text to be clarified.

Or, as Georg pointed out recently, email docs@python.org mentioning the problem (tracker is best, but an email to the docs address is better than not reporting it directly at all). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------