In a message of Sun, 05 Dec 2004 20:15:07 EST, Brian van den Broek writes:

My own inclination is to say something like "a function is a set of pairs, where the first member of each pair is an n-tuple of inputs, and the second member is the m-tuple that is output, and for each input n-tuple, there is a exactly one output m-tuple to which it is mapped."

And, right after that, they'd all drop the class ;-) <snip>

Brian vdB

My experience is that it is better to teach this by showing examples, and then getting to any defintions later, rather than starting with a definition. Depending on your class size, you may be able to get them to produce a definition that works. I'd say that your definition doesn't explain why 3 successive calls to random.randrange(4) produces 3 different results. Laura