On May 28, 2017 06:09, "Russell O'Connor" wrote: On May 28, 2017 03:16, "Peter Todd" wrote: On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 06:32:38PM -0400, Russell O'Connor wrote: > On May 22, 2017 23:05, "Peter Todd" wrote: > > On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 03:05:49AM -0400, Russell O'Connor via bitcoin-dev > wrote: > > MerkleRoot := SHA256(SHA256(LeftRoot ⋅ RightRoot)) > > sha256Compress : Word256 × Word512 -> Word256 > > To be clear, what math operations do you mean by "⋅" and "×"? > > > By "⋅", I usually mean concatenation (though I also use it for function > composition in one instance). By "×", I mean the Cartesian product. Cartesian product can mean a lot of things. What specifically do you mean by "cartesian product" here? Oops, I forgot to reply all. Below is my reply. Given two types A and B, then A × B is the type of pairs of A and B in the sense of type theory as used in Standard ML or Haskell or other typed languages. To follow up, by "sha256Compress : Word256 × Word512 -> Word256" I mean that sha256Compress is a function that takes two arguments, the first being a 256 bit word and the second being a 512 bit word, and returns a 256 bit word (or equivalently sha256Compress is a function that takes a pair as input, the first component being a 256 bit word and the second component being a 512 bit word, and returns a 256 bit word). sha256Compress is meant to be the compression function defined by the SHA256 standard, though nothing here depends on anything more that its type signature.