Re: [GIT PULL] x86/mm for 6.4

Linus Torvalds
2023-05-03T19:19:45Z

On Wed, May 3, 2023 at 12:02 PM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> I suppose that's a very long winded way of saying, that yes, ofcourse 0
> is a positive number :-)

Well, I do consider it as such, but I guess I took all my math classes
when people still considered negative, zero and positive to be three
disjoint sets, and 'non-negative' was required for rigor.

Some googling around says that a lot of people still think that, and
that it might even be language-specific.

I think the commit commentary about "ok, strictly non-negative" might
still be relevant. At least to some people, and at least for
sticklers.

Also, I do consider 0 to be part of ℕ, although I wouldn't consider
that to be an argument about "positive" at all.

The argument for 0 in ℕ would be that without it, you don't have an
identity element for addition, which would arguably make natural
numbers kind of broken as a set.

Linus