In a post criticizing Wolfram Alpha, Xamuel references the fact that “0!=1”. Coming from a programming background (with C syntax in particular), I thought “Of course 0 doesn’t equal 1, even though the point of this post is to erroneously prove that it does”. But no, what he actually meant to convey is that the factorial of zero is equal to 1. It is unacceptable that I should be confused in such a manner. The exclamation/bang symbol should not be used for negation seeing as how it is commonly used for factorials. I have seen some formal logic using the tilde to indicate negation, and since I don’t that’s used for anything else, I recommend its adoption. I have less frequently seen “><“, by mixing up the greater and lesser symbols to indicate inequality. Not as good as a simple negation.
May 3, 2011
Entitled to an Opinion 
May 4, 2011 at 1:10 am
You could always use ¬ for negation and ≠ for inequality. Obviously, they aren’t standard characters, so most people would have to search though a character map to find them, though you can use a non-standard keyboard layout to get around that problem. I think that the United States-International keyboard lets you type in ¬ with AltGr+\, for instance.
May 4, 2011 at 11:32 am
The tilde is already used for negation in C, bitwise negation. So that’s taken.
May 4, 2011 at 10:49 pm
You should read up on the gamma function.
May 5, 2011 at 1:29 pm
All the original statement really needs is appropriate use of spaces.
0! = 1
0 != 1
See?
May 5, 2011 at 7:54 pm
The Reluctant Apostate, I had enough of trying to type special characters in my few years of German classes.
User, just use bitwise negation on a boolean value, and you’ll get desired behavior, right? Just like logical & and |.
Leonard Euler, that’s interesting.
melendwyr, there are a number of things I like about the Python programming language. Its assigning of semantic meanings to whitespace is not one of them.
May 9, 2011 at 6:15 pm
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