[seqfan] Re: Eventually-signed sequences

[Charles Greathouse]

I think that if sign and nonn refer only to the initial terms in the
STU/VWX lines then there's really no value.  But if they refer to the
entire sequence, there's surely some value, just like ,mult,.

Does anyone use these in their searches?  I will on occasion, but
rarely compared to other keywords like base.

Charles Greathouse
Analyst/Programmer
Case Western Reserve University

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Alonso Del Arte
<alonso.delarte at gmail.com> wrote:
> So you're saying that nonn and sign no longer serve any purpose, either for
> humans looking at the OEIS or for the computers handling the OEIS (whether
> server-side or client-side)?
>
> I think that if nothing else, those two keywords have value as a tradition.
>
> Al
>
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 8:37 PM, <franktaw at netscape.net> wrote:
>
>> Well, I didn't say that that was what I thought the policy should be,
>> just that that is what it is. I didn't make the policy; Neil did.
>>
>> My personal opinion is that these keywords should be removed. The
>> program to process submissions can just as easily examine the sequence
>> to see whether there are any negative terms -- to decide whether to add
>> %V, %W, and %X lines -- and I don't see any other real use for them.
>>
>> Franklin T. Adams-Watters
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Alonso Del Arte <alonso.delarte at gmail.com>
>>
>> The policy as described by Franklin certainly makes it easy to handle
>> sequences for which we are not certain that they do or do not contain
>> negative numbers. Still, I think it would be better for the sign
>> keyword to
>> apply even if no negative terms are "visible," and for sequences of
>> unknown
>> status to go off the best thinking on the subject (e.g., in the case of
>> A086811, since H. Moller who wrote the paper cited for that sequence
>> thinks
>> it contains no negative terms, it should be nonn rather than sign).
>>
>> Just my two cents,
>> Al
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 7:28 PM, <franktaw at netscape.net> wrote:
>>
>> > The policy has long been that the sequence should have the "sign"
>> > keyword if there are negative values entered in the sequence -- that
>> > is, in the %V, %W, and %X lines.  So your 85 examples below should be
>> > "nonn".  It looks like your 20 "nonn" sequences with negative values
>> > have them only in b-files or other extension, so they are correct.
>>
>>
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