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Ordered pairs



   What is the reason for having the ordered pair defined as

	   [x, y] = { { x,y }, { x } };

   and not as 

	   [x, y] = { x, {x, y} }

   -- 
   Piotr Rudnicki 

One reason might be that it generalizes in a natural
way to ordered triples, etc. For instance, one could have

	   [x, y, z] = { {x,y,z}, { x,y }, { x } }.

William Faris

Department of Mathematics
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 

(520) 621-6877

faris@math.arizona.edu