Reading the documentation

[Steve D'Aprano]

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.