Re: Natural data type ?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

In the end, its just a name. A rose by any other name would still give you
sets with and without zero... :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Chad R. Meiners" <crmeiners@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:a7u4as$ec8$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu...
> I seriously doubt that someone made a random decision.  There are many
> reasons to define N to include zero, for instance, the positive integers
can
> easily represented as Z^+ while the negative integers may be represented
as
> Z^-.   There is a very nice symmetry with these representations of
disjoint
> sets.  It doesn't make sense to define the natural numbers to simply be
the
> set of positive integer because you then have two competing names for the
> same set.  Thus, it is better for the natural numbers (N) to be a
different
> set from the positive integers (Z^+).  Since zero isn't positive, this
> leaves N as the only candidate for containing zero.
>
> Very likely, whoever made this decision for Ada's data type of natural and
> positive had a similar rational reason for making this choice.  I just
don't
> see the designers flipping a coin or playing paper, scissors, rock to
> determine which data type gets zero ;)  I wasn't around during Ada's
initial
> design process; perhaps someone on comp.lang.ada was, and they know why or
> who made this decision or even if the decision was contested.
>