Talk:arity

Etymology

“From -ary, based on a Latin root.” What root? Josh L. (talk) 13:42, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Does the ety at (deprecated template usage) -ary help? Equinox ◑ 13:44, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, it was a cross-language misunderstanding. Josh L. (talk) 06:59, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

How do we trace back to (2003) who decided to drag this Latin word fragment in to the computer science domain? How do we then suggest that it be deprecated? 50.121.78.5 17:44, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

You can't really stop people using a word once it's caught on. Equinox ◑ 17:47, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

I cannot disagree. So, either try for once to intentionally deprecate something. Or, start introducing our own words as a form of graffiti. The number of arguments going in to a function are just that. They are not 'arity.' "Argument" already fulfills the intent in both singular and plural forms. Thank you for listening to my "arguments." 50.121.78.5 18:02, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

They're not synonyms. A word meaning "X" isn't the same as a word meaning "the number of X". Otherwise we could drop the word age because we already have year. Equinox ◑ 18:09, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

"Arity" is being used to define "The number of arguments or operands a function or operation takes." We don't see "Arities," so if that is the case we now have a less effective word than "argument." "Argument" singular means one argument and arguments (plural) means more than one. "Arity" is the same except it lacks any clues to the actual number of arguments. The word "Operands" from mathematics is often used in programming but we don't use it as readily as "arguments." Why should we give credence to "arity?" Unfortunately, Wikipedia is media feeding back in to itself since it is often, and in this case, the first search result for word definitions.

Then I have one request. Please register the earliest known origin (age/year) of this "word." Thank you again. 50.121.78.5 18:31, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

A function that takes six arguments has an arity of six. The arities of the functions atan and atan2 are, respectively, one and two. --WikiTiki89 20:54, 18 January 2017 (UTC)