OT: excellent book on information theory

[Bengt Richter]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:12:24 +0200, Juho Schultz <juho.schultz at helsinki.fi> wrote:

>Anton Vredegoor wrote:
>> 
>> Returning to the original book, why did they write a lot of it (at
>> least the first few pages until I gave up, after having trouble
>> understanding formulas about concepts I have no such trouble with when
>> framed in less jargonized from) in unintelligible mathemathical
>> notation when there's Python?
>> 
>
>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.

ISTM probable that his original equation was really saying
    assert a*2.5e-8 == x
which is not very different from
    assert x == a*2.5e-8

Did you mention that "=" is not "==" in python?
I too would resist the idea that
    assert a*2.5e-8 == x
"should be written as"
    x = a*2.5e-8

Regards,
Bengt Richter