special case
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English
Noun
special case (plural special cases)
- A specialized instance of a more general phenomenon, category, etc.
- Antonym: generalization
- For quotations using this term, see Citations:special case.
- A class of phenomena that is a subset of a more general class.
- Coordinate term: species
- 2013, Luc J. Wintgens, The Law in Philosophical Perspectives: My Philosophy of Law, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 42:
- Habermas, e.g., put forward that the legal discourse should not be understood as a special case of the moral discourse because in law next to moral reasons there are also ethical and pragmatic reasons to play a legitimate part (J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 230 ff.).
- A theorem or other statement that follows directly from a more general statement.
- 2008, Andrei D. Polyanin, Alexander V. Manzhirov, Handbook of Integral Equations: Second Edition, CRC Press, →ISBN, page 356:
- This is a special case of equation 4.9.10 with .
- 2005, James Robert Brown, Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction to a World of Proofs and Pictures, Routledge, →ISBN, page 33:
- Clearly, the Pythagorean theorem is a special case of the more general theorem, arrived at by letting r = 1.
Related terms
Translations
class of phenomena that is a subset of a more general class
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theorem or other statement that follows directly from a more general truth
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Verb
special case (third-person singular simple present special cases, present participle special casing, simple past and past participle special cased)
- (transitive, intransitive, chiefly programming) To treat something as a special case; to handle in an explicitly different way.
- 1988, Jon Louis Bentley, More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder, page 10:
- Special-casing the 100 most common words in English might speed things up.
- 1992, Scott Knaster, Keith Rollin, Macintosh Programming Secrets, page 46:
- If these programs work as well as they can even without going through QuickDraw, what's the penalty for going around the system and special casing?
- 2009, Peter Seibel, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming, page 258:
- Other languages have since special-cased that kind of computation with, for example, generators in Python or something where you can yield values.