Another newbie question

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 10 Dec 2005 22:56:12 -0500, Mike Meyer wrote:

[snip]

>> Really, I don't think this makes a good poster child for your "attribute
>> mutators make life more difficult" campaign...;-)
> 
> The claim is that there exists cases where that's true. This cases
> demonstrates the existence of such cases. That the sample is trivial
> means the difficulty is trivial, so yeah, it's a miserable poster
> child. But it's a perfectly adequate existence proof.

Huh?

As I see it:

Claim: doing X makes Y hard.
Here is an example of doing X where Y is easy.
Therefore that example proves that doing X makes Y hard.

Perhaps I've missed some subtle meaning of the terms "demonstrates" and
"existence proof".



-- 
Steven.