Unfortunately, computer languages have taught people that "to" means "to and including". Which is sad, because _most_ of the time, loops in computer languages really want "up to", rather than "through" -- e.g., for i=0 up to length(a) do a[i]:=0 Half-open looping intervals compose much better than closed intervals. When programming in assembly language, you can compare "i" to "length(a)" via the following code: LDA i ADDCOM length(a) BC end_of_loop where "ADDCOM" means "add 2's complement" (i.e., "SUB") and "BC" means "branch on carry". (There's one case where this doesn't work.) Here is where U.S. mathematicians have embarrassed themselves by sticking with a numbering system for matrices & vectors analogous to the U.S. system for numbering building floors -- 1:N -- instead of the rest of the world (ROW) system -- 0:(N-1). At 05:58 PM 10/31/03 -0500, Mike Speciner wrote:
So when one says "from a to b", does that mean the interval [a,b], or (a,b), or [a,b) or (a,b] ? I know that I use "thru" in place of "to" if I want to unambiguously indicate "]". I think I use "from" to mean "[", but I won't swear to not ever using it for "(". And then there's the phrase "between a and b".
If you're going to invent new words (and I'm pretty sure I'd rather stick with "nonnegative") they really ought to be clearly better than the alternative. I understand the awkwardness of phrases like "greater than or equal to", but it's only a problem when speaking. Otherwise, I can write ">=", or, in my favorite programming language, "ge".
--ms
John McCarthy wrote:
We could pretend the Russians invented it and use otzero, meaning the same as fromzero but shorter.