On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 08:55:36AM -0500, Steve Drees wrote:
Chris Withers writes:
marc lindahl wrote:
To me this sounds like a huge mistake -- it's a different
escalation rule
than any other language.
Go to agree with that. What are the reasons _for_ doing this? Most people without knowledge of "C" derived programming languages are astonished that "1/2" can be "0".
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.
This is not the place to discuss this. But the integer operation is 'gazinta', not divide. As in, 8 gazinta 59 7 times with remainder 3. If you really want to improve integer division, it should return a tuple, (dividend, remainder), especially since almost all hardware finds both simultaneously. That would break too much code also. But at least it is sound mathematically (both grade school and graduate school) and far less expensive computationally. For those who are too young to remember their gazintas (or not American enough), that was what the phrase 'goes in to' degenerates into after a bunch of grade schoolers are chanting it. That is, divide is defined differently over the group of integers, than over the field of rationals or of real numbers. It is a notational confusion that the integer 1 and the rational 1/1 have the same notation. It happens to be a useful confusion in most contexts. This is not one of them. Jim Penny BTW: I thought that last I saw Guido was leaning against this PEP.
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