re bad leadership

[Chris Barker]

Paul Boddie wrote:

> > PEP238 proposes that / be the inverse of *, so that '(a/b) * b = a
> > (more or less)' and that 'a // b == floor(a/b)'.  If we 'swap the proposed
> > meanings of // and /', then we would have a/b == floor(a/b), which would
> > break almost all existing floating point code.
> 
> I suspect that the contributor who made the above unattributed
> suggestion actually meant that the meanings should be swapped
> intelligently in the PEP in such a way that the explanatory text be
> altered accordingly.

I'm sure that was the intention, but we need to keep in mind that the
PEP proposed two types of division, NEITHER of which is the current one,
so in order to keep total backward computability, we would need to add
two operators, which would really get messy.

And, this has been repeated MANY times, but despite the working in the
PEP "Rationale" section, there are some very good and compelling reasons
to have the proposed division that are relevant to experienced
programmers, not just people learning. Guido recently said he will
re-write the Rationale section to include this. I have been convinced by
those reasons, though I think we need a better way to handle the
backward computability issue.

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker,
Ph.D.                                                           
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