Re: Mixing OO and DB

"Marshall" <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:34489163-fa33-43e9-b8e5-a179655118e7_at_i12g2000prf.googlegroups.com...

> > No, that does not save you. You cannot provide any non-trivial finite
> > subset of reals closed on multiplication.
>
> Since you challenge is trivially easy on the face of it, I expect
> there must be additional, hidden qualifiers that you have
> not stated, which you will only trot out once I answer.
> How unappealing.
>
> Nontrivial subsets of reals closed on multiplication:

The juxtaposition of "trivial" with "trivially easy" sparked an association in my mind.

Mathematicians use the word "trivial" as a technical term, whose meaning diverges slightly from the meaning of "trivial" in common parlance. Engineers tend to use the word "trivial", nearly always, as meaning roughly the same thing as "trivially easy".

There is a large overlap between the things that are mathematically trivial, and the thnigs that are trivially easy from an engineering perspective. This leads engineers, and sometimes even mathematicians, to understand each other's use of the word "trivial" as the same as their own.

It's often a misunderstanding, and sometimes it comes back to bite them. Received on Sun Feb 24 2008 - 14:50:10 CET