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A comment on Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (2017). Parent comment

Re:Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (2017) by lwerdna on Thursday July 29, 2021 @01:40PM (#27999138)
When you accuse someone of being wrong, it's helpful to provide justification, not insults.

Y: How do I strip unnecessary symbols after a decimal point?

X: How do I round a number to a desired precision?

It looks like the perfect example of XY problem to me. Please tell me how I'm confused.

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Re:Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (2017) by moralestapia on Thursday July 29, 2021 @02:33PM (#27999834)
Your Y is not a different problem, it's just a poorly worded description of X.

In an XY-problem situation, X and Y are different problems.

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Re:Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (2017) by lwerdna on Thursday July 29, 2021 @03:38PM (#28000465)
They are different problems. Stripping the final character from "3.14159" does not produce the same result as rounding to 3.1416.

The first action concerns a syntactic property of PI's decimal representation while the second action concerns a semantic property of PI's value.

A related example given on https://xyproblem.info is a user asking (Y) how to extract the final 3 characters of a filename string when he probably intends to ask (X) how to retrieve a filename's extension.

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