On 13-04-25 07:52 AM, Diggory Hardy wrote:
My opinion (that nobody will follow, but I still give it) is that integers
should not have the "/" operator at all. This was one of the bad choices of
C (or maybe of a previous language).
Hmm, maybe, though I can imagine plenty of people being surprised at that.
What really gets me though is that % is commonly called the "mod" operator and
yet has nothing to do with modular arithmatic (I actually wrote a blog post
about it a few months back: [1]). If it were my choice I'd either make "x % y"
do real modular arithmatic (possibly even throwing if y is not positive) or
have no % operator (just mod and rem keywords).
While it's true that people often pronounce % as "mod", the fact is most
of the languages in the lineage we're looking at treat it as "rem".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulo_operation
50 languages in that list expose 'remainder' and 19 of them map it to
'%'. As well, as a "systems language", it _is_ salient that the
instructions on the CPUs we're targeting and the code generator IR for
said machines (LLVM) expose a remainder operation, not a modulo one. Of
the 35 languages that expose _anything_ that does "proper mod", only
interpreted/script languages (TCL, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Rexx, Pike
and Dart) call it %. That's not our family. I'm sorry; if we're arguing
over "what the % symbol means", it means remainder in "our" language
family (the one including C, C++, C#, D, Go, F#, Java, Scala).
(more gruesome comparisons available here:
http://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across-languages/Mthmt.html#MthmtcDBQAM
)
There are other questions to answer in this thread. We had a complex set
of conversations yesterday on IRC concerning exposure of multiple named
methods for the "other variants" -- ceiling, floor and truncating
division, in particular. We may need to expose all 3, and it might be
the case that calling any of them 'quot' is just misleading; it's not
clear to me yet whether there's a consistent method _name_ to assign '/'
to (floating point divide seems to do the opposite of integer divide on
chips that have both).
But I don't think it's wise to map % to 'mod' if we're exposing both
'mod' and 'rem'. That's a separate issue and one with (I think) a
simpler answer for us.
-Graydon
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