From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Nov 08 2005 - 21:52:09 CST
From: "Guy Steele" <Guy.Steele@sun.com>
>> A positive value too. Zero is both negative and positive.
>>
> That is not the mathematically conventional use of those terms;
> rather, zero is neither negative nor positive. That is why we use the
> terms nonnegative (to mean "zero or positive") and nonpositive
> (to mean "zero or negative").
That's the conventional mathematical use of the term positive, as I learnt
it. To say not null, I learnt "strictly positive", and never "non-negative".
This may be cultural differences here (I'm in France, the terms were
actually in French). But there are much enough mathematical
demonstrationsand definitions of variables that use "positive" inclusively.
We could also say "positive or null" but this is generally not necessary.
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