Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> - As a sequence of mechanical transformations of symbols.

That's the "formal" mechanism I was talking about in the programming 
language thread.

> - As a vague but intuitive examination of *why* this (or at least 
> something roughly this shape) should work.

Yeah. Math tends to go for the "do all the gruntwork first, building bottom 
up to the final statement, and finish", usually without explaining why you 
would care about the final statement. :-)

> I still vividly remember the day I figured out why that famous formula 
> actually solves quadratic equations. Maybe I'll share it with you?

Sure.

>> I'm not a very mathematical person.
> 
> ...says the guy who actually knows WTF a nondeterministic Turing machine 
> *is*! :-P

That's pretty trivial mathematics compared to tensor calculus type stuff. 
:-)  I'm not too bad at discrete math.

> documentation is inside the library source code, so to update it you'd 
> have to submit a patch to the library maintainer, yadda yadda yackt...

Write it, patch it, suck out the docs, say "isn't this great? Here's the patch."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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