Re: protected.pm (more Class::Fields)

[Ilya Zakharevich <ilya@math.ohio-state.edu>]

Tom Christiansen writes:
> I always thought Russell's hierarchical layers of sets that contain only
> sets that don't contain sets that contain sets ad infinitum was a bit of
> a kludge

Russell's?  I would say Zermelo-Frenkel, but I did not check history
of this for quite some time...

Of course it is a kludge, but only in the same way as the usage of
math in quantum mechanics is a kludge.  In both cases human language
and human intuition (build from human experience with human-scale
nature) fails when put in a radically different ground (REALLY BIG
collections, and relatively lightweight objects).  And when a language
fails, one is forced to use a different language.

ZF succeeds by (essentially) redefining one word only ("set").  In
fact this may be more confusing than quantum mechanics, when
*everything* needs to be redefined, so one is psychologically more
prepared.

Ilya

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