In the past, it was customary in the English mathematics texts, especially in the UK, to use the French word for the integer part of a number, because the usage of this function had been borrowed from French mathematicians.

ALGOL 60 had taken many notations from the standard mathematical notation of that time, including operators and function names, so it resembled much more a mathematical text than the American programming languages like Fortran, where the main criterion for designing the syntax was using the restricted character set of the IBM printers, which lacked most mathematical symbols, leading to notations like "*", "/" and "**" for multiplication, division and exponentiation, where ALGOL would use "×", "÷", and "↑".

The operator ENTIER (French for “whole”) takes a REAL operand and likewise yields an INT result, but the yield is the largest integer equal to or less than the operand. Thus ENTIER 2.2 yields 2, ENTIER -2.2 yields -3