OT: excellent book on information theory

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:12:24 +0200, Juho Schultz wrote:

> Because the intended audience is probably reads formulas better than
> they read Python. The 1st sentence of the Introduction: "This book is 
> aimed at senior undergraduates and graduate students in Engineering, 
> Science, Mathematics and Computing".
> 
> Last month I spent about an hour trying to explain why
> a*2.5e-8 = x
> raises a SyntaxError and why it should be written
> x = a*2.5e-8
> The guy who wrote the 1st line has MSc in Physics from Cambridge (UK).
> In mathematics, there is no difference between the two lines.

An hour???

No disrespect intended, but either you are really bad at explaining, or he
is really bad at listening. Thinking of some of the MSc's I've known,
especially those from Oxbridge, I'm guessing the second.

"The interpreter does not have human intelligence, and requires a fixed
format. Equals sign does not represent equality, it represents
assignment, and the left hand side of the assignment must be a name, end
of story. Yes, it sucks that you can't write Python code in mathematics,
just like it sucks that you can't write English in French or Lisp in C.
Get over it."


-- 
Steven.