!wtf ellipsis

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Sat Aug 14 19:05:19 EDT 2004


AdSR wrote:

> It's funny, I always understood ellipsis ('...') as a kind of a
> wildcard or abbreviation mark, rather than absence mark. For example,
> you'd write:
> 
> a[1], a[2], ..., a[N]
> 
> which means "all values from a[1] to a[N]" or something like that.
> 
> But then of course it's just a symbol...

It's an indication that something was removed or abbreviated.  In
mathematics, it has the same meaning, but it's often used in the context
of showing a pattern and then removing unnecessary elements (after the
pattern is obvious), so it tends to get the implied meaning of "and so
on."

-- 
 __ Erik Max Francis && max at alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/  \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ Suffering is a journey which has an end.
    -- Matthew Fox



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