> It's an incredibly common well established convention within a group of pilots, controllers, airline workers, hostesses, etc.
In other words, it's _not_ an incredibly common well established convention. Thanks for clarifying my confusion.
In other words, it's _not_ an incredibly common well established convention. Thanks for clarifying my confusion.
Ditto, for example, 'klick' for kilomtre in certain military and gaming circles.
You might argue against "incredibly common" wrt general global population, the counter is that it's incredibly common within a globe spanning subgroup.
You'd fail to make the case against "well established" unless you'd care to argue that jargon of some five+ decades isn't well established.
I dare say there are conventions that you would argue are common that have near zero reach outside of the USofA .. handegg for example.
Anyway I think I'll bow out at this point. I'm not finding this discussion especially enlightening.
Leaving aside that it came up often enough back in the early 1980s when I was working on the first draft of Magma (known then as Cayley) and having discussions with John Cannon, Charles Leedham-Green and George Havas, I would not say that it's as common among mathematicians to use the term as it is among air travellers and pilots to use city codes.
All air travel workers deal with destination codes, generally on a daily basis.
Not all mathematicians work with Abstract Algebras.
> I'm not finding this discussion especially enlightening.
Agreed. Your example certainly struggled for relevance.
Anyway I think most people mean "common" to say "you have some reasonable expectation that it will be understood". That's what I certainly mean. So yeah I think I'll stick with my original point here:
> In other words, it's _not_ an incredibly common well established convention. Thanks for clarifying my confusion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530035
Anyway I'll have to log out after this comment since I feel myself getting dumber. Apparently I don't have enough self-control here to extract myself from this discussion in any other way.