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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 17:32:49 +0100
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On 26/03/2025 15:01, Michael S wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 10:00:40 +0100
> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
> 
>> On 26/03/2025 00:55, James Kuyper wrote:
>>> On 3/25/25 19:38, Keith Thompson wrote:
>>>> Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:
>>>> [...]
>>>>>                                           For me there's an
>>>>> additional practical fact to keep in mind; that what we call
>>>>> "Ganzzahl" (whole numbers) isn't corresponding to what "whole
>>>>> number" means in English,
>>>>
>>>> What "whole numbers" means in English doesn't necessarily
>>>> correspond to what "whole numbers" means in English.
>>>
>>> According to the Wikipedia article on integers, "The whole numbers
>>> were synonymous with the integers up until the early 1950s In the
>>> late 1950s, as part of the New Math movement, American elementary
>>> school teachers began teaching that whole numbers referred to the
>>> natural numbers, excluding negative numbers, while integer included
>>> the negative numbers. The whole numbers remain ambiguous to the
>>> present day."
>>
>> That's an interesting historical point, thanks.
>>
>> It's also important in such discussions to remember that the USA
>> doesn't have a monopoly on the English language, or maths - they
>> can't even spell "maths" correctly :-)
>>
>> So "everyday English" usage will vary in time and space, as will the
>> definitions people were taught in school (which most "normal" folk
>> will have long forgotten anyway).
>>
> 
> But your school in UK taught you the same meaning of 'whole numbers' as
> James's school in US. 

I haven't said any such thing - I cannot remember if my school taught 
the term "whole number" at all, or whether or not we included 0 in 
"natural numbers".  (Usually I would not include 0 as a natural number 
without specifying it, but I can't tell you where that preference came 
from.)

What I have said is that the term "whole number" in English usually 
means non-negative integers.  But I don't think it is entirely 
consistent, and I don't know what is taught in schools in the UK or how 
that might have changed or how consistent it is.  (Note also that there 
is no UK-wide education standard - education in Scotland, along with the 
legal system and religion, has always been completely separate in 
Scotland despite the union of the crowns and the union of the parliaments.)

I am confident that the term "integer" is used consistently for the set 
of positive, zero and negative integers throughout schools in the UK, 
using the blackboard-Z symbol.  But I have no idea when they 
standardised on this, or whether there was a specific standardisation 
effort or just a gradual change.


> So, it seems, US and UK had common 'New Math'
> movement that supposedly didn't affect majority of non-English-speaking
> countries.

That also does not follow at all.

It is certainly /plausible/ that the countries cooperated on this.  It 
is far more likely that there was no connection at all.