Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Modulo is hardly an obscure operation. "What's the remainder...?" is a
simple question that people learn about in primary school.
Well, sort of. The way I remember it, the remainder was just
something that fell out as a side effect of division -- the
annoying bit left over that you didn't know what to do with.
We weren't taught to think of "finding the remainder" as
a distinct operation that's useful in its own right. Once
we were taught to do proper division with decimal points
and everything, the concept of a remainder seemed to get
discarded and was never mentioned again.
A couple of years later we were briefly introduced to the
concept of modulo arithmetic, but as far as I remember, the
connection with division and remainders wasn't pointed out.
Also, it was presented in a very abstract way, and I couldn't
see any practical application for it at the time. (At that
age, it hadn't occurred to me that some of the stuff we
were being shown might be just pure mathematics for its own
sake, and I was often thinking to myself, "Why am I being
taught this?")
It wasn't until much later when I got into programming that
I began to see all the connections and applications. For
people who don't become programmers, I suspect they never
have much use for remainders in everyday life.
Now, in a desperate attempt to stop rambling and get back
on topic...
Eelco Hoogendoorn wrote:
The dot is clearly quantitatively in another realm here.
Also it has almost unchallenged supremacy as the attribute
access operator in just about every language having some
form of struct concept, going back to around Algol 68.
Spelling of the mod operator is much more variable.
{'COMMENT': 24, 'DEDENT': 29, 'NL': 46, 'NAME': 256, "':'": 30,
'NEWLINE': 83, "'-'": 1, 'NUMBER': 1, "'['": 1, "','": 17, "')'": 37,
"'('": 37, "'%'": 2, "'.'": 48, "'=='": 1, "'*'": 1, 'INDENT': 29, "']'":
1, "'='": 28, 'ENDMARKER': 1, 'STRING': 19}
That gives attribute access being a little less than 7% of the source
code.
However, it's clearly the most commonly used *operator* by
a large margin.
The dot can be easily mistaken for a comma,
Not in my code, because I always put a space after a comma,
and never after an attribute-access dot. (And if you can't
tell whether there's a space there or not, you need a
bigger font or better glasses. :-)
Also, dots sit nicely under my little finger where they're
easy to type. I like dots. Dots are a great goodness.
--
Greg
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