Comment by dataflow
14 days ago
> But then you are saved from adding seconds to milliliters, because then the types will tell you it's complete nonsense.
I was thinking about this as I was reading your comment, and wondering: is it nonsense? If I have 5 seconds of time as well as 10 milliliters of water... I can consider them as being packaged together... which is addition. And I can subtract 3 milliliters and 6 seconds from them without running out of what I had. Nothing wrong with that, really. Five potatoes and a gallon of water is the same notion, just more familiar. Seems no more nonsensical than dividing length by time, right? Food for thought...
Bundling the time and the volume might be better called "forming a vector" or "forming an ordered pair" rather than "addition". You can then perform addition and subtraction with the resulting ordered pairs or vectors.
There's no need for ordering (it's a bag rather than a vector), but yeah.
That's nonsense because addition loses the structure. 3 litres and 6 seconds becomes indistinguishable from 4 litres and 5 seconds. Maybe that's what you want, but it's realistically pretty much never what you want.
That's not how it works. Addition losing structure doesn't mean "strip out everything from the textual description that isn't a number". It just loses some properties, like ordering.
Which means, for example: (3 liters and (i.e. "+") 6 seconds) + (4 liters and 2 oranges) = (7 liters and 6 seconds and 2 oranges). Perfectly sensible addition, which you do all the time. There's no stipulation the output has to be a single number...
Alright you're just talking about a different operation entirely but have decided to give it the name "addition". Not particularly insightful, but thanks anyway.
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