26 Jul
2001
26 Jul
'01
6:39 p.m.
We're not talking about third graders, we're talking about 7th graders and up - C programmers, C++, Java, even BASIC. They "know" that 1/2==0, but that 1.0/2 == 1/2.0 == 0.5. This is because, mathematically, the numeric representation is really floor(1.0/2.0). These are the people that will be programming Python, not english majors. English is not a programming language.
From: Steve Drees [mailto:drees@the-bridge.net]
Marc & Chris are wrong here. Every 3rd grader in the US knows that 1/2 is not 0. So I would say that (american) english agrees with the proposed new division rules in python.