in reply to Re: Re: Re: What is the fastest pure-Perl implementation of XXX?
in thread What is the fastest pure-Perl implementation of XXX?

To the extent that "factorial" is an arbitrary function, you can define it any way that you like. This is trivially obvious, but not very useful.

But you will have a very hard time finding any mathematician who agrees that it either makes sense or is useful to define 0! as anything other than 1. I can think of a half-dozen reasons to make it 1. None to call it 0. If you did find such an odd mathematician, I guarantee that it won't be someone in combinatorics (which is the field of math where factorial tends to come up the most).

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