Future division patch available (PEP 238)

[Guido van Rossum]

Stephen Horne <steve at lurking.demon.co.uk> writes:

> If I take serious damage to my professional reputation because of this
> change and my vocal Python advocacy, I'll more than likely be starting
> up my own competing scripting language. I won't expect success, but it
> will be interesting and I will expect that others will have the same
> thought, so once the breakaway projects start coalescing there might
> well be a *better* alternative in the end. Maybe a bit melodramatic,
> but it's not like it's hard to find a scripting language market these
> days.

More power to you.  Since your new language won't be restricted by
backwards compatibility, you'll find that the better choice for
int/int is to return a float, or perhaps a rational, rather than
following C (whose insistence on closing integers under division, as
that of so many other languages, is inspired by the price of floating
point hardware twenty years ago).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)