Re: (*) -> 1

[Óscar Fuentes]

Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de> writes:

> Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> writes:
>
>> (*) ➜ 1
>> (*) ➜ 1
>>
>> We will get total of 2 Ferraris out of nothing.
>
> And with (concat) we get an empty string in the garage out of nothing.
>
> (*) and (concat) obviously are not useful in conjunction with Ferraris.
> There is no interpretation in terms of Ferraris.
>
> We don't want to constrain math to things that have interpretations in
> Ferrari collections.

This is not about Mathematics, it is about notation, that means,
convention, that means, convenience.

In other programming languages an expression such as "+ 2" would yield a
partially applied function:

let f = + 2
f 5
-> 7

Lisp (or some implementations of it) went the route of "+ sums a list of
numbers." That's fine, and in that sense having (+) -> 1 is reasonable,
but there is nothing in Mathematics that says that it must be so instead
of yielding partially applied function, or simply throwing an error
message. Lisp's option is a consequence of its syntax (notation).