[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: #\a octothorpe syntax vs SRFI 10

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 58 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 58 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.




On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Aubrey Jaffer wrote:

>Another possibility is to use the word "natural" for nonnegative
>integers:
>
>exact           64.bit natural-number           #nA:natural-64
>exact           32.bit natural-number           #nA:natural-32
>exact           16.bit natural-number           #nA:natural-16
>exact           8.bit natural-number            #nA:natural-8

Nix.  Not what mathematicians mean by "natural numbers."
Guaranteed to cause confusion when someone presumes that
he can't store zero, or is allowed to divide by something
because it can't be zero, etc.  "Nonnegative" is the word
that means what you want in mathematics, "Unsigned" is the
word that means what you want in computer science.

			Bear