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Posted by Davmon on 12/29/35 11:44
PeterMcC arranged shapes to form:
> Davémon" <"davémon wrote in
> <55yge2pfd8n5$.w18635w13l1c.dlg@40tude.net>
>
>> Toby Inkster arranged shapes to form:
>>
>>> Davémon wrote:
>>>
>>>> Lists with no items? That doesn't make any sense to me at all!
>>>
>>> The mathematical equivalent for the UL element would be what is
>>> called a "set".
>>>
>>> A set is a group of numbers/shapes/letters/vectors/whatever. Some
>>> examples are the set of all positive integers, the set of letters
>>> that directly follow vowels in the alphabet, and the set of all
>>> people called Kevin.
>>>
>>> The set is an abstract concept, and can be dealt with
>>> mathematically, in many cases without worrying about how many (if
>>> any) elements it contains.
>>
>> However, HTML is a language, and I don't think Language and
>> Mathematics are directly comparable.
>
> In lots of ways, they are.
>
>> For example, in maths, two negatives make a positive, wheras in
>> language (English at least) two negatives are just emphatically
>> negative. "I don't know nothing about it".
>
> That's a double negative - it means the positive: if I don't know *nothing*
> about it then I do know *something* about it.
Among the people who use the phrase, double negatives of that kind are
simply emphatic, and it is /always/ understood and used as such.
--
Davémon
http://www.nightsoil.co.uk/
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