PEP 238 (revised)

[David Eppstein]

In article <cp4rrz5onj.fsf at cj20424-a.reston1.va.home.com>,
 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> Here's a completely revised version of PEP 238.  It contains a long
> motivational section, a clear specification of what will happen, and a
> discussion of rejected alternatives, a list of open issues, a Q-and-A
> section etc..  I hope it answers most questions that have been raised
> about this issue.  I'd be happy to revise it if there are still things
> unclear.

I agree with the previous poster who said to use "quotient" instead of 
"floor division".  Also, both types of division are mathematical results, 
just of different operators.  So maybe instead of the unclear phrase "the 
mathematical result" to denote, you know, the floating point style 
division, maybe you could call it the ratio.

Example of this substitution made to first two paras:

    The current division (/) operator has an ambiguous meaning for 
    numerical arguments: it returns the integer quotient of two ints or 
    longs, but it returns a reasonable approximation of the ratio of two 
    floats or complex numbers.  This makes expressions expecting float or 
    complex results error-prone when integers are not expected but 
    possible as inputs.

    We propose to fix this by introducing different operators for 
    different operations: x/y to return a reasonable approximation of the 
    ratio, x//y to return the quotient.  We call the current, mixed 
    meaning of x/y "classic division".
-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/