Future division patch available (PEP 238)

[Stephen Horne]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2001 19:44:58 GMT, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
wrote:

>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).

And the convenience of integer arithmetic with discrete measures such
as array subscripts in a vast number of algorithms.