I find people like to change data types, go from concrete to abstract and back to concrete, and overall come up with solutions that no longer match the problem(s
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You're being silly here however. Numbers by their nature are abstract. There is no 'One' or 'Three' in the world you can point to.
As a second point of silliness using English to express an algorithm does not means you're changing the type of the number itself. English is perfectly acceptable when it comes to portraying simple algorithms. Anything more complex (such as a machine-efficient way to round numbers) is better suited to psudocode (as above). The English you give for rounding however _is_ the most efficient from a highly parallel pattern matching point of view (I.E. the human brain).
no more silly than someone who has a "favorite color" - yes, a number has no purpose if it is not being used to describe a set of objects, I agree. However, that doesn't mean that "blue" and "7.5" have no value.
When you evaluate a number as a string (the stuff to the left and right of the decimal), how is that not treating it differently than a number? I'm not arguing whether we can round a number just by looking at it - obviously, we can :)
btw - not sure I'd call your solution a formula; you're just using operators from a programming language. Such operators wouldn't be found on a list like this for instance. And what would happen if x was -0.6?
x>0, ⌊x+0.5⌋ x<0, ⌊x+0.5⌋-1
Same idea, but whats that "floor" thing anyway? There's an even cleaner way that even a kid could do without having to tell him what something meant. There are many such ways, actually.
We've abstracted so much that our solutions to simple problems are no longer really geared to the actual problem. "rounding" is just an extremely simple example of
'number' is not an object until you write it down. The script of numbers is a physical object you can look at and if necessary touch (and get your fingers dirty if the ink isn't dry).
Also that wasn't floor that was mod. It's a legal mathematical symbol even if it's not used often (same as ^ is used as power rather than superscript due to the limitations of most text mediums).
Your entire argument appears silly using rounding as your example. Perhaps you need a better example?
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X-=(X%1)
You're being silly here however. Numbers by their nature are abstract. There is no 'One' or 'Three' in the world you can point to.
As a second point of silliness using English to express an algorithm does not means you're changing the type of the number itself. English is perfectly acceptable when it comes to portraying simple algorithms. Anything more complex (such as a machine-efficient way to round numbers) is better suited to psudocode (as above). The English you give for rounding however _is_ the most efficient from a highly parallel pattern matching point of view (I.E. the human brain).
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When you evaluate a number as a string (the stuff to the left and right of the decimal), how is that not treating it differently than a number? I'm not arguing whether we can round a number just by looking at it - obviously, we can :)
btw - not sure I'd call your solution a formula; you're just using operators from a programming language. Such operators wouldn't be found on a list like this for instance. And what would happen if x was -0.6?
x>0, ⌊x+0.5⌋
x<0, ⌊x+0.5⌋-1
Same idea, but whats that "floor" thing anyway? There's an even cleaner way that even a kid could do without having to tell him what something meant. There are many such ways, actually.
We've abstracted so much that our solutions to simple problems are no longer really geared to the actual problem. "rounding" is just an extremely simple example of
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Also that wasn't floor that was mod. It's a legal mathematical symbol even if it's not used often (same as ^ is used as power rather than superscript due to the limitations of most text mediums).
Your entire argument appears silly using rounding as your example. Perhaps you need a better example?
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