On Apr 11, 2006, at 3:14 PM, realbasic-nug-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
That page is a little misleading; it's basically correct, but
could be written more clearly. The short answer is this -- 1 is
not a prime because its exclusion makes the theory cleaner.
Longer answers require precise statements concerning things like
primality and unique factorization and thus are too much work for
most people.
From what I've read, I'm not doubting that the modern way of
thinking about primes is to exclude 1, but I feel that explanations
still don't change the fact that 1 is divisible by 1 and itself
(1), hence by definition it is *logically* a prime number.
I've read quite a bit about this myself :) It is certainly possible
to define the concept of prime number so as to include 1. But such
definitions have long proved not to be the right one.
"long proved not to be the right one" is not a good argument. What is
the right argument in one sentence? To me it is all based on some
theory, that would exclude 1, because it is a unit. Now, 7 can be
regarded as a unit too, while 6 might be seen as two units of 3, and
thus there must be an obscure and very convolute reason. However,
this subject is not relating to REALbasic, so I will further refrain.
Alfred
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