On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 10:02 AM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 09:22:09AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
Mathematicians and programmers both extend operators to new meanings, but only where it makes sense.
In fairness, mathematicians typically just invent new symbols, when they're not repurposing existing symbols for totally unrelated ideas :-(
I count over 400 maths symbols in Unicode, including over 100 variations on < and > and over 30 variations of the plus sign.
So we want to be *really* cautious about following the lead of mathematicians.
Analytic continuation is basically "hey, let's imagine what this would be like if we did this where it doesn't make sense". And then, oddly, it makes sense anyway. ChrisA