On Aug 29, 2012 10:56 PM, "Henk-Jan van Tuyl" wrote:

On Wed, 29 Aug 2012 23:10:24 +0200, Stefan Monnier <

monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

...

...

Albert Einstein said: Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I repeated the command today and it worked!

So, did you expect the result to be different, or did you re-try just to confirm that it doesn't work?

The day after I tried the command the first time, I thought the result

might be different; I have the experience that my browser crashes, and starting it again results in an immediate crash. Logging off and on again solves the problem. This might be because of a corrupted DLL or a corrupted data area of a DLL.

The command failure could have also been caused by a problem at the

server side.

In conclusion: repeating the same thing could give different results.

This depends on what counts as "the same". (There is a nice book called "The Subtlety of Sameness".) I'm surprised that as users of a language that makes a big deal out of referential transparency none of you have said that neither invoking the same command at a different time nor invoking a browser after changing context (logging in again) is doing the same thing.

Regards, Henk-Jan van Tuyl

-- http://Van.Tuyl.eu/ http://members.chello.nl/hjgtuyl/tourdemonad.html Haskell programming --

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