Comment on PEP-0238

[Guido van Rossum]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> writes:

> Mon, 09 Jul 2001 18:19:10 GMT, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at home.com> pisze:
> 
> > I thought the desire was/is to have an operator which just preserved int /
> > int -> int.  But I have never seen it specified whether float div whatever
> > would be an error or have the current meaning (in which case confirmation
> > would not be necessary).
> 
> I would prefer it to mean integer division of fractional numbers, e.g.
>     1.3 div 0.3 == 4
>     1.3 mod 0.3 == 0.1
> 
> The question whether div should return int or long (or even fractional
> with integral value) becomes irrelevant when ints and longs are unified
> (even if "unified" means that operations on ints return longs instead
> of raising overflow, keeping types distinct).

Indeed, x div y (or x//y, or div(x, y)) will be defined as
divmod(x, y)[0].  This is already defined for floats and returns an
integer value with a float type.

By the way (this is for Terry :-), int/int in Python does not do the
same as it does in C for negative operands.

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