Looks like translating a positional numbering system from ancient cultures than ruling out or not if they had the concept of zero. It may be a single use symbol, here is nothing, instead of being part of bigger amounts. Numbering systems doesn't have to be positional (nor go too far).
I highly recommend suffering through both early and late Wittgenstein (only wrote 2 books and essentially invented one of the 3 branches of philosophy).
Expect to only understand 10% of what he says, but that is normal.
Separately, pragmatism by William James is an easy 4 hour read and you can have 2/3 of the branches of meta philosophy.
What I wonder is: why has nobody noticed that code editors lack a concept of 0?
When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.
If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!
Yeah, I will. I'm being a bit coy because I already have a very specific solution in mind which would be a lot like Scratch, but unifying those ideas with syntax. It should be fully ready to share quite soon.
Ugh I got rate limited so I had to make a new acct just to post this reply:
Sure! Like mad libs if you couldn't be sure if _____ was a missing part or the text what was meant to be there. In a mad lib it's obvious, but with code it may be less obvious. You certainly can't just use _ with code. Even the nil code point is allowed in some programming languages' source code (e.g. rust).
Of course. The Chinese number system is base 10 (or, if you scale way up, base 10,000) with a positional writing system.
The symbol for ten is 十. Heck, there's also a symbol for twenty, 廿, and it exists despite the number system being base 10. Anything that has to be written a lot is likely to have a convenient written form.
If you're curious, zero is 零. Successive zeroes are combined, so 一千零一 is 1001. 5147 would be 五千一百四十七. 10, as previously mentioned, is 十.
Zero has two roles: as a positional placeholder and as a cardinal value (nothingness or net-zero). This only addresses the former.
Afaict, most ancient civization have conception of "nothingness" or "emptiness". The dispute is often whether they consider it as a number or not
We have both. Zero and Null are different data types.
Looks like translating a positional numbering system from ancient cultures than ruling out or not if they had the concept of zero. It may be a single use symbol, here is nothing, instead of being part of bigger amounts. Numbering systems doesn't have to be positional (nor go too far).
Gosh I love Wittgenstein for this.
I highly recommend suffering through both early and late Wittgenstein (only wrote 2 books and essentially invented one of the 3 branches of philosophy).
Expect to only understand 10% of what he says, but that is normal.
Separately, pragmatism by William James is an easy 4 hour read and you can have 2/3 of the branches of meta philosophy.
What I wonder is: why has nobody noticed that code editors lack a concept of 0?
When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.
If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!
This could be interesting but too vague for me to understand what you mean. Could it be explained more clearly, or link some blog entry?
Yeah, I will. I'm being a bit coy because I already have a very specific solution in mind which would be a lot like Scratch, but unifying those ideas with syntax. It should be fully ready to share quite soon.
Like Madlibs?
Ugh I got rate limited so I had to make a new acct just to post this reply:
Sure! Like mad libs if you couldn't be sure if _____ was a missing part or the text what was meant to be there. In a mad lib it's obvious, but with code it may be less obvious. You certainly can't just use _ with code. Even the nil code point is allowed in some programming languages' source code (e.g. rust).
How about an `extern` variable in C?
A million variations exist. I'm looking for a programming-language-agnostic concept. The closest you'll find are templating languages like Handlebars
Delimited continuations? Though I'm not totally clear what you're asking for. Semantics or syntax?
Syntax. Delimited continuations would be a similar concept but for semantics
> If you knew somehow that some symbol corresponds to 20, then you’d know they didn’t use base 20 because base b doesn’t have a single symbol for b.
Well, this is plainly false.
I suppose Roman numerals would be one counterexample, but are there any number systems based on place/position value that qualify as counterexamples?
Of course. The Chinese number system is base 10 (or, if you scale way up, base 10,000) with a positional writing system.
The symbol for ten is 十. Heck, there's also a symbol for twenty, 廿, and it exists despite the number system being base 10. Anything that has to be written a lot is likely to have a convenient written form.
If you're curious, zero is 零. Successive zeroes are combined, so 一千零一 is 1001. 5147 would be 五千一百四十七. 10, as previously mentioned, is 十.