Brian Boutel wrote:
William Lee Irwin III wrote:
The Standard Prelude serves its purpose well and accommodates the largest cross-section of users. Perhaps a Geek Prelude could accommodate the few of us who do need these sorts of schenanigans.
Amen.
Aha. And we will have The Prole, normal users who can live with incomplete, sometimes contradictory math, and The Inner Party of those who know The Truth? Would you agree that your children be taught at primary school some dubious matter because "they won't need the real stuff". I would agree having a minimal standard Prelude which is incomplete. But it should be sane, should avoid confusion of categories and useless/harmful dependencies. Methodologically and pedagogically it seems a bit risky. Technically it may be awkward. It will require the compiler and the standard libraries almost completely independent of each other. This is not the case now. BTW. what is a schenanigan? Is it by definition someething consumed by Geeks? Is the usage of Vector Spaces restricted to those few Geeks who can't live without schenanigans? Jerzy Karczmarczuk PS. For some time I follow the discussion on some newsgroups dealing with computer graphics, imagery, game programming, etc. I noticed a curious, strong influence of people who shout loudly: "Math?! You don't need it really. Don't waste your time on it! Don't waste your time on cute algorithms, they will be slow as hell. Learn assembler, "C", MMX instructions, learn DirectX APIs, forget this silly geometric speculations. Behave *normally*, as a *normal* computer user, not as a speculative mathematician!" And I noticed that REGULARLY, 1 - 4 times a week some freshmen ask over and over again such questions: 1. How to rotate a vector in 3D? 2. How to zoom an image? 3. What is a quaternion, and why some people hate them so much? 4. How to compute a trajectory if I know the force acting on the object. To summarize: people who don't use and don't need math always feel right to discourage others to give to it an adequate importance. It is not they who will suffer from badly constructed math layer of a language, or from badly taught math concepts, so they don't care too much.