I'm sure that you have read a lot more math papers than have I, but
I can tell you that I have _never_ seen a math or computer science
paper in which |N excluded 0. At least in the CS community, if you
want the positives only, you need to say |N^+ (i.e., |N superscript +).
Re "unsigned": actually in C/C++, "unsigned" means modular arithmetic
relative to the word size, so "unsigned 5" (written "5U"), means
5 modulo 2^n (n=8, 16, 32, 64, etc.).
At 01:40 PM 10/31/03 -0500, John Conway wrote:
>On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Henry Baker wrote:
>
>> Whatever happened to |N, as in "Natural" numbers? Call it a "natural".
>
>There are two objections to this. The first is that my request was for
>a word meaning "at least zero". This won't be applied only to integers.
>The second is that there are still two schools of thought about "natural
>number", the "inclusivists" (like me) who count 0 as one, and the
>"exclusivists" who don't. Until the great day when the inclusivists
>win, it remains ambiguous.
>
>> Computer languages such as Ada have had to deal with this same problem --
>> that of naming the set of non-negative numbers.
>>
>> I think that C/C++ call these "unsigned ints", or unsigned's, for short.
>
> Those are slightly different again, since the "unsigned integer 5" is
>really the quotient concept {5, -5} rather than the sub-concept +5.
>
> John Conway
