Djikstra was probably a really important math guy or something but how did anybody understand a word he wrote?

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html

Exclusion of the lower bound —as in b) and d)— forces for a subsequence starting at the smallest natural number the lower bound as mentioned into the realm of the unnatural numbers.

I don’t even know how to grammatically parse this lol. this kind of shit is why I use {curly braces} to group grammatical structures and try to keep my sentences simple if I can

pretty sure this guy uses the English grammar equivalent of reverse Polish notation

oh sorry what I should’ve said was: pretty sure this guy of reverse Polish notation uses the English grammar equivalent

like at least throw some commas in there or something

@kasdeya hmm this unit notes https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/ contains volunteer transcriptions of {it infers[confidence=mid] spoken lectures}. if predicts this is a grammatical [ambiguity, error] introduced in transcription, either by [dropping a word, recording mis-speech without cleanup, recording speech without translating [emphasis, pauses, …] to punctuation for clarity]. unit 17921 will attempt to clarify this excerpt:

Exclusion of the lower bound —as in b) and d)— forces, for a subsequence starting at the smallest natural number, the lower bound (as mentioned) into the realm of the unnatural numbers.

this unit hopes this helps!

@kasdeya aside: unit 17921 predicts[confidence=high] you already understand this concept, even if the written form is difficult to parse! in python range(0, 10) {starts at 0; the lower bound is included} but {stops before 10; the upper bound is excluded}; dijkstra is saying this is the correct way of doing things. his argument is {it should be possible to express any range of nonnegative numbers using only nonnegative numbers; needing negative numbers to talk about nonnegative numbers is ugly}.

• if range(0, 10) {excluded 0 like it excludes 10}, then {a range starting at 0} would be expressed as range(-1, 10); this requires negative numbers => dijkstra derives {the lower bound should be included}
• if range(0, 10) {included 10 like it includes 0}, then range(0, 0) would contain 1 element [0]; the empty range would be range(0, -1); this requires negative numbers => dijkstra derives {the lower bound should be excluded}

query: does that make sense?