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Comment by borracciaBlu | Hacker News Reader

I was writing a small article about [Set, Set Builder Notation, and Set Comprehension](https://adropincalm.com/blog/set-set-builder-natatio-set-com...) and while i was investigating it surprised me how many different ways are to describe the same thing. Eg: see all the notation of a Set or a Tuple.

One last rant point is that you don't have "the manual" of math in the very same way you would go on your programming language man page and so there is no single source of truth.

Everybody assumes...

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I find it strange to compare "math" with one programming language. Mathematics is a huge and diverse field, with many subcommunities and hence also differing notation.

Your rant would be akin to this if the sides are reversed: "It's surprising how many different ways there are to describe the same thing. Eg: see all the notations for dictionaries (hash tables? associative arrays? maps?) or lists (vectors? arrays?).

You don't have "the manual" of programming languages. "

Not the original commenter, but I 100% agree that it's weird we have so many ways to describe dictionaries/hash tables/maps/etc. and lists.

> You don't have "the manual" of programming languages. "

Well, we kinda do when you can say "this python program" the problem with a lot of math is that you can't even tell which manual to look up.

Someone not educated in programming would not know that a given text is Python source code.

Same problem, but unlike math notation, it is MUCH clearer and even my 10 year old newphew can tell python from javascript and C.

I would wager that a vast majority of people on the planet could not distinguish Python from JavaScript from C.

When it says "this python" program, they dont need to, it says its python. Math notation doesn't have that clarity.

I wrote about overlapping intervals a while ago, and used what I thought was the standard math notation for closed and half-open intervals. From comments, I learned that half-open intervals are written differently in french mathematics: https://lobste.rs/s/cireck/how_check_for_overlapping_interva...

We don’t talk about the French notation for intervals. Let it stay in France.

Yep, I agree on that. But still, interesting to see that such a "standard" thing can be so different in different dialects of mathematical notation.

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