Etymology and culture notes for class 2 --------------------------------------- Information processed by a computer is usually called "data". This is the Latin plural of "datum", which is the perfect passive participle of "do", which means "to give". So a "datum" is a thing which has been given (in usual speech, a fact), and "data" are things which have been given. There's a controversy about whether "data" should be considered plural in English, almost exactly like the controversy about whether "media" should be considered plural. ("The media are unfriendly"? "The data are inaccurate"? "The media is protected by the first amendment, as the New York Supreme Court recognized in the Narconews case"? "The data suggests that eating zinc is likely to reduce your chance of catching a cold"?) The French word for "digital" -- as in "a digital computer" -- is "numerique", which I think is ideal because it conveys the fundamental point. French also has some other good words for computing: "ordinateur" is computer, because a computer is something which organizes or sorts or arranges numbers, and "logiciel" is software, because software is a series of logical steps which explain how to solve a problem or perform a task. The Latin word for "chain" is "catena", from which we get at least three obscure English words, "concatenate", "catenet", and "catenary". The prefix "con-" means "with" or "together", so "concatenate", from Latin, means "to chain together", or "to join together, as though in a chain".) Python uses the "+" symbol to refer to this concatenation -- to make you think of addition. If you think of a sequence type as a chain, concatenation means stringing together two sequences (two lists, strings, etc.) into a single chain. [The Unix program "cat" is short for "concatenate" and has nothing to do with household pets.]