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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Integral types and own type definitions (was Re: Suggested method
 for returning a string from a C program?)
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:33:19 +0100
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 26/03/2025 10:59, Keith Thompson wrote:
> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> writes:
> [...]
>> Sure.  But most people have forgotten such details long ago - negative
>> numbers are not part of daily life (except as an indicator of how much
>> you owe the bank...).  After all, negative numbers are not natural!
> 
> Most people understand credits and debits.

They do.  But they understand it as "I owe the bank $100" - they don't 
view it as "I have -$100 in my bank account".  Even when looking at 
ledgers and accounts, they will primarily see a negative number as an 
indication of a positive amount moved in the other direction - the minus 
sign is symbolic, with alternatives such as parentheses or red type 
meaning the same thing.  When adding up the numbers, they do not see it 
as adding some positive and negative numbers together - they see it as 
sometimes adding numbers, sometimes subtracting them.

In almost all everyday situations that appear to use signed numbers, 
people do not consider negative numbers.  Rather, they think of 
non-negative numbers with a tag attached for the direction.  We might 
write that a stock market change is -2%, but we say and think that it 
has gone down 2% - no negative numbers are involved.

Even in C (in a desperate attempt to bring us back on topic for the 
group), there are no negative integer constants - merely positive 
integer constants with a unary minus operator applied.

> 
>> So if you ask someone random "Do you know what an integer is?", a
>> likely response will be "That's a whole number, isn't it?  Like 1, 2
>> or 3 - not something like a half."
> 
> I suspect that most people who would use the word "integer" without
> being prompted would use it correctly.
> 

You could be right there, yes.