On Saturday, 2 November 2013 at 22:45:13 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
I spent considerable amount of time on those names. Like you, I
am not happy with Inverse. :)
I wanted to say struct Negate and function negate(). But ! is
the negation operator.
I like opposite better but the Wikipedia article calls it
"additive inverse" so inverse is still acceptable, I guess? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operators_in_C_and_C++
Well, if you don't want to change it now that the chapter has
been released, don't worry -- it's not wrong per se, just
somewhat unintuitive to my native English ear.
I think that Negative and negative() (not Negation) would be
fine. Bear in mind that ! is the _logical_ negation operator;
without the qualifier, the word doesn't have the same meaning.
"The negative of x" is just -x.
The trouble with inverse (for me) is that its colloquial meaning
is the multiplicative inverse, while in a strict mathematical
sense it is too general -- you can have an inverse of _any_
function, so the term always needs to be qualified as the
"inverse of ..." (whether of addition, multiplication, some other
choice of function). But this may be my fussing too much. ;-)
