File talk:Noncommutative Example Concatenation.svg

Difficult to understand

I find this example very difficult to understand. Although I believe I understand both concatenation and commutativity pretty well, I so far fail to grasp the intention behind this image. The main problem for me is the consecutive + and ≠ operators. Makes me wonder whether one or both of these are considered characters or part of an operation description, instead of a binary operator within an expression.

Here is what I read so far, after a rather longer look than I'd deem necessary for an example: Pre-concatenating (adding) the string "EA" to some other string is a different operation post-concatenating the string "TTEA". No surprise there. And in the second line: the empty string is different from the string "EATTEA". Relation to the first line unknown.

This mathematical formulation feels rather ill suited as an example. Perhaps something closer to everyday language could be found. If there were words "foo", "bar" and "baz" such that "foobarbaz" differs from "foobazbar" then the example would probably be clearer. If "foobarbaz" and "foobazbar" are both actual words, then it would be even clearer that we are talking about combining strings here, not about executing some obscure mathematical operation far away from "everyday life". And it might add a funny note as well.

--Martin von Gagern (talk) 10:20, 12 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I just found that 1. the page history has versions I unserstand better, and 2. the current version looks good in SVG as well. It seems the rsvg rendering engine is breaking things somehow. Will file a report. --Martin von Gagern (talk) 10:24, 12 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Filed bugs for MediaWiki and librsvg. --Martin von Gagern (talk) 12:22, 12 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]