On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 11:25 am, Ben Bacarisse wrote: >> Integral \In"te*gral\, a. [Cf. F. int['e]gral. See Integer.] > > For me (and I suspect for BG too) the surprise is in its use as a noun. > The capital letter is, presumably, significant because it refers to the > Python class Integral -- a subtype of numbers.
English doesn't just verb nouns and noun verbs, it also nouns adverbs and adjectives too. Human, as in human being, is a nouned adjective, as are black and white (as in people, not in colours). Going back a while, a wireless is a wireless radio. We eat Chinese or Italian (as in the foods, not the people). You can probably think of many other examples :-) > With that in mind, "an Integral" is a shorthand for "an Integral value", > or more fully, maybe, "an instance of numbers.Integral". Indeed. This process of nouning words is common enough that native speakers shouldn't be surprised by it. Deplore it, perhaps, but not surprised :-) > The use as a noun is not covered here, though it is only a small step > from other places where membership of a mathematical set has turned the > adjective into a noun. "Rational" and "real" started out as adjectives, > but their use as nouns is now widespread. "The function returns a > real". "The result is a rational". It's much less common for complex > and integral, to the point that it sounds wrong to me. I agree with "complex", but "integral" as a synonym for integer seems okay to me. I think it's because "complexes" is awkward. -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list