For speaking, what's wrong with "at least" for "greater than or equal to", and "at most" for "less than or equal to"? And there's an implied comparison absent from "not less than" and "not greater than". "Nonnegative" can be replaced by "at least zero", not an obvious improvement (though for partial orderings like IEEE floating point, they are different). --ms asimovd@aol.com wrote:

Mike Speciner writes:

<< ...

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".

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But "only a problem when speaking" can be significant if one likes to talk about math, such as when collaborating or teaching. I hope that simple concepts like nonnegative can be expressed with fewer syllables in the future. Maybe using just "nonneg" and "nonpos" will catch on.

--Dan

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