Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

Don Groves scripsit:

> An object is sitting on the teacher's desk at the front of the room.
> The problem is to develop a formal procedure that will move the
> object from there to the southwest corner of the room. Easy enough...
> 
> Then the teacher says to repeat the problem with the object sitting
> on the floor next to the teacher's desk. The only acceptable answer
> is to pick up the object and place it on the desk -- the rest of the
> problem is already solved!

A puzzle:  You are in a room with a gas stove, a match, a bucket full
of water, and a kettle. Your objective is to boil water. What, exactly,
do you do?  Obviously you light the match, use it to light the stove,
fill the kettle from the bucket, put it on the stove and wait.

Second puzzle: You are in a room with a gas stove, a lit match, a bucket
full of water, and a kettle. Your objective is to boil water. What,
exactly, do you do?  The same thing except not bothering to light
the match? Wrong. That's physicist/engineer thinking. A mathematician
would blow out the match and then say he had reduced the problem to the
previous problem!

IOW, programming is about the Real World, and the Real World is inherently
stateful.

-- 
May the hair on your toes never fall out!       John Cowan
        --Thorin Oakenshield (to Bilbo)         [email protected]