Comment by twixfel
16 days ago
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.
16 days ago
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.
What? Addition isn't just for numbers. This is literally no different from adding vectors. I'm sure you've seen that in school?
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