bug 116546

[Linas Vepstas]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 01:06:44PM -0400, Derek Atkins was heard to remark:
> Sorry, but it's very hard to get used to.  "1 > foo" just isn't
> intuitive to about 99% of the programmers out there (including me).

Surely, its no harder than getting used to it the other way around?

I visuallize a real-number line.  Negative numbers on the left,
positive on the right.   The thing you are comparing to in the middle.
Which side is it on?  Its a trick I learned in grad school, beats
the pants off the grade-school dictum of 'you just subtract and 
compare to zero', which always lead me to confusion and errors. 

(Elided tirade about bad elementary school math education in the US.
I've got a kid in first grade, and they've already managed to screw
up the math ed.  I mean, they had a really great opporitunity to 
teach addition and instead they did drills to memorize the answers to 
2+2, 3+5, etc. No wonder kids hate math! It sucks!)

--linas


-- 
pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas at linas.org>
PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984  3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933