ABSTRACT
The introduction of the digital machine changed this view of science, at first slowly, partially and with great difficulty, but then with increasing rapidity, completeness and ease. The computational sciences, such as computational hydraulics, which we may regard as the sciences that are normative with respect to the technologies which they support, recognized that science now had to face two ways, both towards the best ways of working of our own minds and towards the best ways of working of our digital machines. There thus opened up a space within science that connected the workings of our own minds, that were by this time thoroughly and apparently inextricably rooted in the thought-world and sign-representations of the continuum, and the workings of our digital machines, which we could only envisage at all in our thought-world and sign-representations of the countable. Computational hydraulics then became one of the occupants of this space. Accordingly, computational hydraulics spans this conceptual and semiotic space between the continuum and the countable and it is now our task to make a fli'St exploration of this space within the ambit of hydraulics.
