# TIP 294: The "entier" Function: It's Spelt "entire"
Author: Lars Hellström <[email protected]>
Author: Richard Suchenwirth <[email protected]>
State: Rejected
Type: Project
Vote: Done
Created: 03-Nov-2006
Post-History:
Keywords: Tcl,number,cast,rename
Tcl-Version: 8.5
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# Abstract
It is proposed that the **expr** function **entier**\(\) introduced by [[237]](237.md)
is renamed to **entire**\(\).
# Rationale
This appears to be a typo. Even though American English differs from British
English in that many words which in the latter end in "-re" are spelt "-er",
this is not one of these. Neither _Merriam-Webster Online_ nor
_dictionary.com_ recognises "entier", whereas both list "entire". A Google
search for "entier" reports 61400000 pages, but if one narrows it down to
pages in English the count drops to 943000, and even then most of these are in
fact written in French. Within the first 60 matches, only 3 show "entier"
occurring in English text, and in all these cases it is part of a
trademark/product name.
Googling for "entier function" shows however that it is a concept discussed in
English texts. entier\(\) was one of the standard functions in Algol 60.
# Alternatives
While the term "entire" meaning "whole" is known in mathematics, it is rarely
applied to numbers. The typical thing to be entire is instead a function
<http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/Entire.html> , and that is quite unrelated
to integers. Better names could be:
* **whole** \("whole number" sounds a bit childish, but unlike "entire
number", it would probably be recognised as meaning "integer"\)
* **integer** \(this is the proper name for the concept in question\)
It could also be argued that the function is rather silly, since "coercing to
integer" \(which seems to be the same as truncation, i.e., rounding towards
zero\) is mathematically a rather useless operation. More useful operations are
rounding to the nearest integer \(available as round\), floor \(rounding
downwards\), and ceiling \(rounding upwards\), since these admit tight
inequalities that do not depend on the sign of the number. Currently the two
latter have to be had by combining **round** and **floor**/**ceil**,
whereas separate functions **ifloor** and **iceil** would have been more
appropriate. Getting them would however require actually implementing
something new.
# Implementation
This TIP can be implemented by applying the following command prefix to the
contents of the files of the Tcl source tree:
string map {entier entire Entier Entire}
\(It may of course be more convenient to use the search and replace
functionality of a text editor.\) Grepping indicates that the only C file
affected would be _generic/tclBasic.c**, the only Tcl files affected would
be _tests/expr.test_ and _tests/info.test_, and the only documentation
file affected would be _doc/mathfunc.n_.
# Copyright
This document has been placed in the public domain.