The idea of fixing inconsistencies is great. I also like the idea of giving
a mid-term solution for those using the mod operator "incorrectly". But I'm
not sure about opening the door for precisely overloading operators with
different names than the ones specified by default, that seems to be just
the opposite this proposal is for, to avoid different people to approach
the same operator differently. Apart from that, I think that the new
feature has to be maintained as well, and it wasn't born as a feature
Groovy developers wanted but a workaround for something that had to be
fixed.

I would add the @OperationRename renaming it as @ModRenamed (or something
alike) as a transitional workaround for those using mod the old way.

My two cents
Mario

El jue, 23 mar 2023 a las 2:44, Paul King (<pa...@asert.com.au>) escribió:

> Hi folks,
>
> It has been a while but I finally got back around to this issue.
>
> As a reminder, this issue is about using "mod" as the name of the method
> for the "%" operator. Both remainder and mod are the same for positive
> numbers, and we are guilty in informal contexts of sometimes conflating the
> names, but they differ for negative numbers. This caused a difference (only
> for negative numbers) for BigIntegers. In the earlier email, I was going to
> look at "patches" which would allow us to keep "mod" as the operator name.
> I tried numerous "fixes" but they all seemed like patches on top of patches
> rather than a clean solution. So, instead I went with the solution (which I
> previously described as "somewhat intrusive") of renaming the name of the
> operator method to "remainder". This makes it a breaking change for Groovy
> 5 (for -ve numbers and also anyone using the "mod" method name relying on
> DSL-like code) but arrives at a much cleaner solution.
>
> I have created the following PR here:
>
> https://github.com/apache/groovy/pull/1878
>
> To minimise the impact on existing users, I added a new AST
> transform, @OperationRename, which could be used by anyone affected by the
> change when writing DSL-like code using "mod". This also has the advantage
> of giving another option when wanting to use operator overloading with
> existing libraries that might not use the method names Groovy uses, e.g.
> subtract/add/times instead of minus/plus/multiply. We could also look at
> some metaclass tweaking so that the runtime looks for "mod" as a fallback
> for "remainder" before jumping to method missing but I'd probably do that
> as a second pass only if there is sufficient interest.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Cheers, Paul.
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 9:34 PM Paul King <pa...@asert.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> As part of fixing GROOVY-10800, I was planning to make the behavior
>> for the "%" operator for BigInteger be consistent with our other data
>> types (and with Java).
>>
>> Basically, there is a distinction between "remainder" and "modulo" for
>> negative numbers.
>> For the expression "numerator op divisor", they will be the same for
>> positive numbers but for negative numbers, "remainder" will return a
>> negative number for a negative numerator while "modulo" will always
>> return a number "0 <= result < divisor". You can get one from the
>> other by adding the divisor to a negative result from "remainder".
>>
>> What is sometimes a little confusing is that the "remainder" operator
>> (%) is often informally referred to as the "mod" operator (since they
>> are the same for positives). Indeed, we use "mod" as the name of the
>> method to use for operator overloading purposes.
>>
>> Currently the behavior is:
>>
>> def nums = [-10, -10L, -10f, -10d, -10G, -10.0G]
>> assert nums.collect{ it % 3 } == [-1, -1, -1f, -1d, 2G, -1.0G]
>>
>> (Note: The BigDecimal result relies on GROOVY-10786, so currently only
>> in master.)
>>
>> Changing the behavior is easy (albeit breaking for negatives) but
>> there is a knock on consequence. Since we use "mod" as our method for
>> operator overloading, the BigInteger "mod" method is then no longer
>> available.
>>
>> For Groovy 5, we could go and rename our operator overloading method
>> from "mod" to "remainder" or some such but it is quite an intrusive
>> change.
>>
>> There is a workaround which we could document:
>>
>> def negTen = -10G
>> assert 2G == negTen.modPow(1, 3)
>>
>> And/or we could provide a "modulo" extension method on BigInteger to
>> allow:
>>
>> assert 2G == negTen.modulo(3)
>>
>> This last approach was what I was thinking of doing.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Cheers, Paul.
>>
>

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