Language change and code breaks

[Joal Heagney]

Greg Ewing wrote:
> 
> Alex Martelli wrote:
> >
> > I think it was a 19th century fancy, to start with.  Extremely
> > recent when compared to the amount of time mathematics
> > has been written about.
> 
> It's still a lot longer than computers have been around.
> And the fact that they *did* adopt it suggests they
> found it useful in some way. Perhaps because it let
> them express things more succinctly?
> 
> They seem to be satisified with the decision, too.
> I've never heard a group of mathematicians debating
> whether mathematics should go back to being
> case-insensitive (if it ever really was to begin
> with).

Well, it was probably pragmatism that caused them to do it. Especially
with physical mathematics, even using case sensitivity, they still have
to resort to using the Greek alphabet and putting funny lines
over/under/around perfectly ordinary letters to get enough symbols, and
even there, there's a lot of recycling. *thinking of some of the
arguments why we use j for complex numbers in python*

i-already-been-taken-by-the-engineers-'ly yours
-- 
      Joal Heagney is: _____           _____
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