On 8 June 2016 at 00:11, Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > Tom Lane wrote: >> =?UTF-8?Q?J=c3=bcrgen_Purtz?= <juer...@purtz.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 -- Sent via pgsql-docs mailing list (pgsql-docs@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-docs
