12 years of Python and only at v2.2

[Bengt Richter]

On Thu, 05 Dec 2002 11:58:52 -0800, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>Greg Ewing fed this fish to the penguins on Wednesday 04 December 2002 
>06:03 pm:
>
>> That's still monotonic. ("Monotonic" doesn't mean
>> "regular", it just means "always going in the same
>> direction".)
>> 
>
>        "Monotonic" is, itself, a hard term to pin down... Out of three 
>dictionaries in my possession, only the OED had any definitions that 
>were not tied to the literal "single tone". [I would like to state that 
>one of the other two dictionaries is a 4" thick unabridged, not the 
>more common "college" editions]
>
>        The OED secondary definition was of a function which neither increased 
>nor decreased, or if it did increase/decrease, it did so in such a 
>manner (nothing like a recursive definition) -- which I interpret to 
>mean no increase/decrease in steps.
>
I find googling for "definition xxx" (without quotes) often finds definitions.
E.g., with xxx = monotonic:

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=definition+monotonic

The first hit is:

    http://homepages.ius.edu/WCLANG/m413/notes2-3.pdf

(Unless I am misrepresenting, according to the above a sequence is monotonic if

    x <op> successor_of_x is true for the sequence with <op> being any one of <, <=, >, or >=.

and is further classified as increasing or decreasing for <,<= vs >,>=
and further, as strictly increasing or decreasing for < vs >).

Regards,
Bengt Richter