but perhaps only 5% or so would ever describe subtraction as non-communicative

Then one can only wonder what they make of the idea of left- or right-associativity in Operator Precedence and Associativity. (UPDATE: On re-reading, the substitution of ‘communicative’ for ‘commutative’ is quite funny.)

technical or scientific language used to convey a false impression of meaningful technical or scientific content

Or perhaps “unusual-to-domain language used to convey an impression of humour”, a special case of ‘joke’. (If ‘vulgar’ were some technical CS term, then your objection might be appropriate, but I think that's not the case.)

Anyway, much of this thread has been occupied with patches to documentation, and your where/when catch was a good one (it bugged me, too). If you find the language that offensive, and you've got better, then why not submit a patch?

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.