Talk:complement

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

An anonymous contributor helpfully added the more general definition of "complement" that subsumes the ones and twos complments (a good catch; thanks!). I've broken it down the way it is now because the ones and twos complements sense are the usual ones in computing, while the general sense is more limited in use. I would expect that most of the remaining uses are either "nines complement" or "tens complement". I couldn't find "base n complement", "complement base n" or "n's complement" on google at all.

Mathworld doesn't seem to mention either "ones complement" or "twos complement" specifically. It does mention several other complements (knot complement; graph complement etc.), any of which could be called the complement in context. I'm not sure quite how fine to slice all this. The current entry is my current best guess. -dmh 03:12, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Three synonymous explications?[edit]

A) A word or group of words that completes a grammatical construction in the predicate and that describes or is identified with the subject or object

B) Any word or group of words used to complete a grammatical construction, typically in the predicate, including adverbials, infinitives, and sometimes objects

C) complement clause

Could the information in these three be included in one explication? Those seem so synonymous. -- Frous 23:54, 7 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]