descriptive grammar - A word to describe the act to switch between positive and negative?


I am doing some programming with math. I have written a tidy function which turns any positive number to negative or any negative number to a positive.


I would like to name this function in the most informative way so that if someone else were to look at my function; they would understand, straight away, what it does (and expect what it says on the tin).


The best word I can come up with is 'flip' but I feel that it fails at being obvious.


The function belongs to the Math object so it looks like this:


answer = Math.flip(number)

The results might be


-1 = Math.flip(1)

or


1 = Math.flip(-1)

How can I best describe this act?



Answer



invert



verb
1.3 chiefly Mathematics Subject to inversion; transform into its inverse.



(oxforddictionaries.com)


but it has lots of meanings in maths. More precisely, it is the Additive Inverse



the additive inverse of a number a is the number that, when added to a, yields zero



and not to be confused with Multiplicative Inverse



a multiplicative inverse or reciprocal for a number x, denoted by 1/x or x−1, is a number which when multiplied by x yields the multiplicative identity, 1



(wikipedia)


So... err... invert additively? It's not very good, sorry.


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