Home Original page

12 years of Python and only at v2.2

Gonçalo Rodrigues op73418 at mail.telepac.pt
Fri Dec 6 09:51:38 EST 2002 
On Thu, 05 Dec 2002 17:16:56 -0800, Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com>
wrote:

>Tim Peters wrote:
>
>> That is, you don't need reals, you just need lexicographic ordering on
>> tuples.
>
>Oh, of course.  I was speaking of the rigorous mathematical case, where
>you'd have to define a mapping into the reals.  In mathematics, you
>don't even have orderings defined over n-tuples, much less m- and
>n-tuples, where m != n.  Even Python tips its hat to this fact, since
>doing ordering comparisons on complex numbers raises an exception.

Sorry for nitpicking, but assuming ZFC *every* nonempty set can be
well-ordered. The question is, as always, if that order relation is
useful for anything. It is hard to imagine such a well order in the
complex numbers, though...

>
>I was speaking abstractly about mathematics, not about Python.

With my best regards,
G. Rodrigues
More information about the Python-list mailing list