Multiplication [was Re: Late-binding of function defaults]

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 26 Nov 2015 02:59 am, Laura Creighton wrote:

> The great sticking point for the children I am teaching is
> '*' means multiplication.  You can really see that some people
> have to make extensive mental modifications in order to handle
> the concept that mathematical truths are expressed in linguistic
> and orthographic conventions, and that one can swap out a particular
> convention 'x means multiply' and swap in another one '* means
> multiply' while leaving the underlying truth unchanged.

Wow. What age children are you talking about?

I wasn't introduced to programming in any real depth until uni, after
graduating secondary school. I had lots of problems understanding bits of
it, and so did many of my fellow students, but * for multiplication wasn't
one of them.

But by this time, we had already learned in secondary school that you can
use any of the following to write multiplication:

x × y
x ⋅ y
x y

just as you can write division as:

x / y
x ÷ y

Adding * to the list of ways to write multiplication wasn't hard.

And I don't remember anyone having conceptual difficulty learning that xy is
a short-cut for x×y in maths class.


-- 
Steven