• @[email protected]
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    fedilink
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    3815 hours ago

    If you want a clear definition, ask a mathematician:

    A word is any written product of group elements and their inverses.

    Or a computer scientist:

    A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor.

    • @affiliate
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      37 minutes ago

      i wonder what the inverse of the letters in the english alphabet are. since it has a non-prime number of letters (26 to be exact), we know that some letters won’t have inverses. i wonder which letters don’t have inverses. i guess it would be pretty easy to find out if you use the standard alphabet ordering and then port the alphabet over to ℤ/26ℤ, but that’s not a particularly satisfying answer.

    • circuitfarmer
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      fedilink
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      69 hours ago

      Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.