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Robert Lowth stated in his grammar textbook A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) that "two negatives in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative". [19] Grammarians have assumed that Latin was the model for Lowth and other early grammarians in prescribing against negative concord, as Latin does not feature it.
In propositional logic, the double negation of a statement states that "it is not the case that the statement is not true". In classical logic, every statement is logically equivalent to its double negation, but this is not true in intuitionistic logic; this can be expressed by the formula A ≡ ~(~A) where the sign ≡ expresses logical equivalence and the sign ~ expresses negation.
Since 2 × (−3) = −6, the product (−2) × (−3) must equal 6. These rules lead to another (equivalent) rule—the sign of any product a × b depends on the sign of a as follows: if a is positive, then the sign of a × b is the same as the sign of b, and; if a is negative, then the sign of a × b is the opposite of the sign of b.
Negative numbers: Real numbers that are less than zero. Because zero itself has no sign, neither the positive numbers nor the negative numbers include zero. When zero is a possibility, the following terms are often used: Non-negative numbers: Real numbers that are greater than or equal to zero. Thus a non-negative number is either zero or positive.
Two's complement is the most common method of representing signed (positive, negative, and zero) integers on computers, [1] and more generally, fixed point binary values. Two's complement uses the binary digit with the greatest value as the sign to indicate whether the binary number is positive or negative; when the most significant bit is 1 the number is signed as negative and when the most ...
In many contexts, it does not matter whether the second or the third of these usages is intended: −5 is the same number. When it is important to distinguish them, a raised minus sign (¯) is sometimes used for negative constants, as in elementary education, the programming language APL, and some early graphing calculators. [a]
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A number is negative if it is less than zero. A number is non-negative if it is greater than or equal to zero. A number is non-positive if it is less than or equal to zero. When 0 is said to be both positive and negative, [citation needed] modified phrases are used to refer to the sign of a number: A number is strictly positive if it is greater ...