> and you might as well have said "the sky is blue" for its relevance to the rest of what you said

and you are always right. :)

You went on to say

And if features of the concept of addition are not parallel, the product of the features becomes "less" Cartesian, i.e. one gets "more exceptions from the rule".

so it was clear there was still confusion. I wasn't trying to rub anything in.

and you are always right. :)

Then you missed the comma for decimals thread and the scp thread of the weekend.

so it was clear there was still confusion.

No, no confusion, I have a clear mathematical concept!

But I don't know how to transport mathematical concepts in a board of perl hackers, thats why I simplified to "less" cartesian and quoted less!

Let me try:

Universal Algebra abstracts the concept of "Cartesian product" to direct product. (A vector space is just an example of "an algebra" or variety)

If an algebra is not a direct product but embeddable in a direct product it's a subdirect product. The dimension of an algebra is the number on non-irreducible factors.

E.g. the algebra (e.g. a graph or a lattice) representing the state machine for the cases of + and ++ is a subdirect product of the graph representing the cases of "+" multiplied with the rule "++ := +1". Subdirect because of the missing warning.

Sometimes exceptions will even force you to add an extra dimension, just to model this special case.

The algebra representing perl in total is a product of the algebras of it's features, the more it differs from a direct product (i.e. the non-embeddable parts missing from sub-direct products of higher dimensions) the "less cartesian" it is. There are different metrics possible to measure the distance between algebras, but breaks in symmetry are always increasing this distance.

So do you prefer this mathematical approach? :)

Cheers Rolf