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That is, is there a term to specifically distinguish the type of thing x is, as juxtaposed with x', x'', etc?

The wikipedia page on the prime symbol mentions that "The prime is said to "decorate" the letter to which it applies.", which gives me that idea that perhaps "undecorated variable" is the term I'm looking for, but I haven't found any examples of people using it. Is there a standard term for this?

Personman
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  • Not to my knowledge. – Brian M. Scott Feb 15 '21 at 20:27
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    I have never come across either term. Subscripts and superscripts usually have well defined meanings without calling anything decorated. I feel this subject is a blind ally. – herb steinberg Feb 15 '21 at 20:27
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    I have come across both terms, and a quick internet search produced this example of a paper using your phrase "undecorated variables". – Mark S. Feb 15 '21 at 23:01
  • @herbsteinberg But decorations like tildes and primes aren't really subscripts or superscripts in the traditional sense, hence it's useful to have a term for them. – Mark S. Feb 15 '21 at 23:03
  • @Mark S What makes the term useful? In all my years in mathematics I had never heard of them. – herb steinberg Feb 16 '21 at 04:14
  • @herb steinberg If you need a lot of related compact notation with primes and such, you might want to explain to the reader the significance of the undecorated variables. That's done at least in the paper I linked, in the CS book "The Z notation: A Reference Manual", and a couple papers on automata. But I think I first came across this meaning of "undecorated" in undergraduate lectures, probably in place of the cumbersome "without a prime/tilde". For instance, if a transformation turned $x,y$ into $x',y'$ respectively, but a conclusion about the latter helped say something about the former. – Mark S. Feb 16 '21 at 11:56

1 Answers1

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No, no such name exists … besides "undecorated".

I'm posting this CW answer so that users who confidently concur that the answer to the question is "No" have an answer to vote on, and so this question doesn't stagnate in the Unanswered Questions Queue. If however anyone has an affirmative response to the question, please downvote this and post your answer.

Mike Pierce
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  • accepting this primarily because I am convinced by Mark S.'s link to this paper that actually uses the term: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.05557.pdf – Personman Feb 16 '21 at 05:03