I think wmf's comment in this thread was absolutely correct and succinct, so I won't repeat, but I think it's worth noting that many (all?) of the Wayland devs were actually Xorg devs. Make of that what you will.
You’re thinking of this with the benefit of dedekind in your schooling - whether or not your calculus class told you about him.
Density - a gapless number line - was neither obvious nor easy to prove; the construction is usually elided even in most undergraduate calculus unless you take actual calculus “real analysis” courses.
The issue is this: for any given number you choose, I claim: you cannot tell me a number “touching” it. I can always find a number between your candidate and the first number. Ergo - the onus is on you to show that the number line is in fact continuous. What it looks like with the naive construction is something with an infinite number of holes.
I think you are getting away from my point, which pertains to what the article said, which is that mathematicians thought there were "gaps". What mathematician? Can I see the original quote?
The linguistic sleight-of-hand is what I challenge. What is this "gap" in which there are no numbers?
- A reader would naturally assume the word refers to a range. But if that is the meaning, then mathematicians never believed there were gaps between numbers.
- Or could "gap" refer to a single number, like sqrt(2)? If so, it obviously is not a gap without a number.
- Or does it refer to gaps between rational numbers? In other words, not all numbers are rational? Mathematicians did in fact believe this, from antiquity even ... but that remains true!
Regarding this naive construction you are referring to: did it precede set theory? What definition of "gap" would explain the article's treatment of it?
I don’t know the answers to all of your questions - but I believe you’d benefit from some mathematical history books around the formalization of the real analysis; I’m not the best person to give you that history.
A couple comments, though - first, all mathematics is linguistics and arguably it is all sleight of hand - that said the word “gaps” that you’ve rightly pointed out is vague is a journalists word standing in for a variety of concepts at different times.
The existence of the irrationals themselves were a secret in ancient greece - and hence known for thousands of years, but the structure of the irrationals has not been well understood until quite recently.
To talk precisely about these gaps, if you’re not a mathematical historian, you have to borrow terminology from the tools that were used to describe and formalize the irrationals -> if former concepts about the lines sound hand-wavy to you, it is because they WERE handwavy. And this handwaviness is about infinity as well, the two are intimately connected. In modern terms, the measure of the rationals across any subset of the (real) number line is zero - that is the meaning of the “gaps”. There is, between any two rationals, a great unending sea where if you were to choose a point completely at random, the odds of that point being another rational is zero.
EDIT: for a light but engaging read about topics like this, David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More is excellent.
I think you will agree that the bulk of your comment employs a post-set-theory nomenclature.
Regarding "if you were to choose a point completely at random, the odds of that point being another rational is zero", I ponder the question of how one might casually "choose" a value with infinite entropy.
It's getting better (in a C++ kinda way), certainly, but...
It's ultimately still driven my matching "random" identifiers (classes, ids, etc.) across semantic boundaries. Usually, the problem is that the result is mostly visual which makes it disproportionately hard to actually do tests for CSS and make sure you don't break random stuff if you change a tiny thing in your CSS.
For old farts like me: It's like the Aspect-Oriented Programming days of Java, but you can't really do meaningful tests. (Not that you could do 'negative' testing well in AOP, but even positive testing is annoyingly difficult with CSS.)
EDIT: Just to add. It's an actually difficult problem, but I consider the "separate presentation from content" idea a bit of a Windmill of sorts. There will always be interplay and an artificial separation will lead to ... awkward compromises and friction.
I think the Referer header kinda-sorta serves as mitigation for 3rd parties just (maliciously) hot-linking to, say, images on your domain, effectively forcing you to bear the cost of upload bandwidth for those images.
(And similar, it's just that images sprang to mind.)
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