Replies

If we in real academia (e.g., STEM) were cursed by MLA types, they’d be saying that 2 + 2 = 6 for large values of 2 - as 2 approaches 3. - Da Coyote

That's what my calculus professor said…………………..

Puts me in mind of the trap that used to exist in Fortran, which my brother described to me. In Fortran, you call a subroutine with arguments, which are variable names. The trap was that any number explicit in Fortran would be assigned a space in memory. In this example, 2. If you made 2 be an argument in a subroutine, that was bad practice but the compiler would let you do it.
If the argument going in to the subroutine were “TWO” that would be a legitimate variable name. If that subroutine then proceeded to make the command "TWO = 3” then you can understand how when the subroutine returned command to the main program then if you printed out the value of “TWO” that the printout would be the digit “3”.
But the exact same thing would happen if you called that same subroutine with the constant “2”.
That is, the memory word to which the compiler assigned the value 2 (because it was mentioned in the code) it also associated with the name 2. When you called the subroutine with the name 2 (which you naively think of as a constant value 2, the subroutine would be about the variable named “TWO” but as far as the main program was concerned, the name of the parameter was “2”.
The upshot was that if you had your program print out “2” after that action, the value displayed by the printer would be 3.
Thus there was no difficulty, using that procedure, to get your program to tell you that 2 + 2 was 6.