> To even claim the existence of negative numbers is to use a subtraction operator somewhere before you add it.
this is silly: if you have complex numbers, and multiplication, you can get subtraction out of it, and complex numbers are in a sense more fundamental than natural numbers so you should always start with complex numbers
if you start with complex numbers, you can get to negative numbers by i*i
i*i 2*i*i 3*i*i 4*i*i . . .
1 - 1 = 1+ (-1) = 1 + i*i*1
