How about adding rational fraction to Python?

Carl Banks pavlovevidence at gmail.com
Tue Feb 26 09:45:45 EST 2008


On Feb 26, 9:29 am, "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <da... at druid.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:55:22 -0500
> "J. Cliff Dyer" <j... at sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
>
> > Of course.  That's why I think you ought to spell it 3//4.  Nobody gets
> > confused when a strange operator that they've never seen before does
> > something unusual.  Average Jo off the street looks at python code and
> > sees 3/4, and immediately thinks "aha! .75!"  Show the same person 3//4,
>
> Why do we care what A. Jo thinks?  I would hope that A. Programmer Jo
> would see "int {OP} int" and assume int result.

There's no reason why int op int would imply an int result.  It's only
a convention in some languages, and a bad one.

> A. Jo isn't going to be
> debugging anything.
>
> If 3/4 ever returned 0.75 in any language I would drop that language.

Have fun dropping Python, then, chief.  Integer division with / is
already deprecated, can be disabled ever since Python 2.4, and will be
wholly removed in Python 3.0.


Carl Banks



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