Re: Functions and Operators

[Leslie Lamport <tlapl...@xxxxxxxxx>]

Unless you are interested in linguistics, I think it's a waste of time
to worry about this.  I expect that everyone has her own idea of what
the two words mean--an idea that usually approximates some dictionary
definition.  My own observation is that 40-50 years ago, most
mathematicians used the words more or less interchangeably most of the
time.  However, when they were trying to be very rigorous (generally
in teaching introductory courses), they defined a function to be a set
of ordered pairs.