Rather than the quality of our educational system, I blame the compiler writers, at least those compiler writers who insist on strong typing in order to make programs easier to compile, or perhaps just easier to generate more compile-time error messages. Supposedly true/false are better than 0/1 because it allows you to distinguish between booleans against other uses of 0/1.
So they get twisted into knots finding the number of elements of vector x which are greater than 100. That is, +/x>100. You can imagine this might be a problem if the results of x>100 are true/false. See: http://keiapl.org/anec/#Maple . (Ken was such a character. :-) On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > I am going to take this opportunity to note that it has become common > practice to assume: > > (1) Boolean values are truth values, and > (2) Boolean values are not integers, and > (3) Boolean values are not probabilities > > And yet: > > [a] Probabilities are truth values, and > [b] George Boole's algebra was originally about integers > > All of which shows something about the quality of our educational > system, I imagine. > > -- > Raul > > > On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Hi - > > > > While looking at the Wikipedia entry on "Boolean data type" recently, I > > noticed that the APL family is - as usual - unrepresented. Since I was > > looking here because of the maddening arbitrariness with which Booleans > are > > handled in other languages, it occurs to me that the much cleverer > handling > > of Booleans characteristic of the APL world should be given a higher > > profile. > > > > So, any ideas on a Wikipedia entry for "APL, J" handling of Booleans? > > > > Thanks, > > > > Devon > > > > -- > > Devon McCormick, CFA > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
