[issue43737] Documentation of modulo operator should document behaviour clearly when second operator is negative

[Anthony Flury]

Anthony Flury <anthony.flury at btinternet.com> added the comment:

I fundamentally disagree with closing this - I know that this and many other 'quirks' catch beginners out, and the tutorial is what they use to learn.They don't look in the reference document - it is too dense in BNF definitions which turns a lot of people off from any other useful information - When I was researching this issue I didn't even think to look in the reference section.

Looking in the library section for information about the built-in types is also non-obvious to beginners. 

If the tutorial doesn't contain the detail, and doesn't link to the detail then beginners are left entirely puzzled by the behavior.

Given how difficult it is to search the documentation if you don't know exactly what you are looking for, then how beginners would know to look at the FAQ is beyond me. Having communicated with a number of beginners on a number of issues they had no idea that the FAQ even existed.

The change didn't 'bury the tutorial in detail' - it added once sentence which linked to the FAQ. In fact all the change did was expand the FAQ entry by a few lines and link to the FAQ from the three places that are relevant.

I think this is a small change and it should be the start of making the tutorial beginner friendly.

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resolution: not a bug -> 
status: closed -> open

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue43737>
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