Re: INFINITY Revisited


Don Whitehurst wrote:
> What is the difference between a digit string and a character sting?
> How do the infintesimals 0.00...01 not meet the meaning of a "decimal
> digit at digit position n for each position n"? Is it because there is
> no last n in the naturals?

Basically yes (you've answered your own question). The idea of a
nonterminating decimal fraction is that it, uh, has no end (which is
what 'nonterminating' means, of course). For some reason, lots of
people have terrible difficulty with this - they have never (obviously)
in real life encountered something which extended linearly to left and
to right, without having an end at the left and an end at the right. So
when we say, consider the naturals as the unending sequence

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...

where the dots represent the fact that this extends endlessly to the
right, all goes well for about one or two sentences, then they start
talking about the rightmost element. Well, with luck, you can see that
this is nonsense.

Incidentally, your first question above isn't _quite_ right. Dave
Seaman said "those are character strings", but of course so are the
valid representations of real numbers. He might more helpfully have
said "Those are merely character strings (with no interpretation as
real numbers)". The fact that one can string symbols together is no
guarantee that they mean anything, as witness large quantities of word
salad one sees in sci.math threads.

Brian Chandler
http://imaginatorium.org

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Mod 43 Check Digit calculator
    ... miscalculation of the check digit. ... > response to you) should return the check character itself rather than> the ... Here is that formula with the absolute reference problem> that ... > space in the encoding string at the 39th position. ...
    (microsoft.public.excel.programming)
  • Re: strings patterns and the like
    ... >>You could take the string and have a loop to look at each character in the ... Then you could have an array of size 6 which checks the current ... >>position to see if it's an x or a digit... ...
    (comp.lang.java.help)
  • Re: passing array to isdigit()
    ... > in computer programming symbol has a different meaning; ... >>whole string and checks every character ... >>Its interface provides the means to check whether the last digit ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: How do I - Compile a number into the program
    ... and use a second program to insert that number into the ... add a long string of Chrin a module somewhere. ... replace the first character with your ... first digit, and take the difference of that digit and 127, and add that ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: How do I - Compile a number into the program
    ... and use a second program to insert that number into the ... > add a long string of Chrin a module somewhere. ... replace the first character with your ... > first digit, and take the difference of that digit and 127, and add that ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)