Re: Math function description issue

On 8 June 2016 at 00:11, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> =?UTF-8?Q?J=c3=bcrgen_Purtz?= <juergen(at)purtz(dot)de> writes:
>
>> > a) In my opinion this wording is easier to understand because it avoids
>> > the negation via "not less".
>>
>> That's a fair point.
>>
>> The other difference is least/greatest versus smallest/largest. I'm not
>> sure if using least/greatest would help the people who misunderstand
>> "smallest" as "closest to zero". They might; but being less-common words,
>> they might also confuse people whose native language isn't English.
>> Anyone have an opinion about which to use?
>
> As a non-native, the use of "least/greatest" makes it more explicit that
> it refers to arithmetic inequality, whereas "smallest" sounds like it
> may be related to absolute value comparisons. It's true that
> least/greatest are less common words, but that makes it more likely that
> they would be looked up in a dictionary, whereas with smallest/largest
> people might stick to intuitive knowledge and get them wrong.
>

Matlab just uses "nearest" for both floor() and ceil(), e.g. "the
nearest integer less than or equal to ...".

To me, that seems clearer than smallest/largest or least/greatest
because you don't have to think about which set of numbers it's trying
to exclude. When thinking about the nearest integer, you only have to
think about at most 2 possible values.

Regards,
Dean