• Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Fruit the botanical term and fruit the culinary term are just not the same word. Similarly to how theory means something different in science and in colloquial speech. That’s just how language works.

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.

      My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.

      • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        19 hours ago

        I like this.

        Kids are already taught to look for “context clues”

        Namespacing would require the author explicitly define the namespace.

        I would also add versioning as a year/month and localization.

      • jaupsinluggies@feddit.uk
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        1 day ago

        Yes, but then where would we be without all those endless squabbles about X which are easily solved by pointing out that A::X != B::X?