On 04 April 2000, Ka-Ping Yee said:
> On Tue, 4 Apr 2000 gvwilson@nevex.com wrote:
> > (BTW, I think '/' vs. '//' is going to be as error-prone as '=' vs. '==',
> > but harder to track down, since you'll have to scrutinize values very
> > carefully to spot the difference. Haven't done any field tests,
> > though...)
>
> My favourite symbol for integer division is _/
> (read it as "floor-divide"). It makes visually
> apparent what is going on.
Gaackk! Why is this even an issue? As I recall, Pascal got it right 30
years ago: / is what you learned in grade school (1/2 = 0.5), div is
what you learn in first-year undergrad CS (1/2 = 0). Either add a "div"
operator or a "div()" builtin to Python and you take care of the
spelling issue. (The fixing-old-code issue is another problem
entirely.) I think that means I favour keeping operator.div and the
__div__() method as-is, and adding operator.fdiv (?) and __fdiv__ for
"floating-point" division.
In other words:
5 div 3 = 5.__div__(3) = operator.div(5,3) = 1
5 / 3 = 5.__fdiv__(3) = operator.fdiv(5,3) = 1.6666667
(where I have used artistic license in applying __div__ to actual
numbers -- you know what I mean).
-1 on adding any non-7-bit-ASCII characters to the character set
required to express Python; +0 on allowing any (alphanumeric) Unicode
character in identifiers (all for Py3k). Not sure what "alphanumeric"
means in Unicode, but I'm sure someone has worried about this.
Greg
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