Post-Fix Definitions
The last line of my last post bothered me from the time I wrote it.
However, the real lesson is that I should have just posted the sketch. The desire for perfection is useless.
Not that I don’t agree with it, I do. I just couldn’t precisely define what I actually meant by it.
Mathematics is a field where perfection is everything. So it bothered me that I could say that the desire for perfection in a proof was useless, yet I knew I agreed.
I now finally understand what I meant. The key is context. I was sketching a proof not to convince anyone of the truth of the statement but to justify to myself my own use of a termination condition that I had already written into code. The sketch I drew up, despite being incorrect, convinced me of that condition’s correctness and gave me a glimpse of why. Though that glimpse was incomplete, it served it’s purpose in the context.
Anyway, at some point, I’ll actually follow through with writing things other than maths here.
