GCD in Fractions

[Stefan Behnel]

Wolfgang Maier schrieb am 23.09.2014 um 18:38:
> While at first I thought this to be a rather irrelevant debate over module
> private vs public naming conventions, I now think the OP is probably right
> and renaming fractions.gcd to fractions._gcd may be a good idea.

Making a public API private is rarely a good idea. It should be enough in
this case to document the behaviour.

And, believe it or not, it actually is documented:

https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/fractions.html#fractions.gcd


> Googling for recipes to calculate the gcd using python brings up
> fractions.gcd as a general answer (like at stackoverflow:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11175131/code-for-greatest-common-divisor-in-python)
> and it is not obvious for non-mathematicians to realize that it is NOT a
> generally acceptable solution.

It is. Certainly for positive numbers, which clearly present the majority
of use cases. It's definitely the "normal" use case, wouldn't you say?

For negative numbers, the "expected" behaviour seems to be unclear, so the
current behaviour is just as good as any, so backwards compatibility
concerns clearly win this fight.

Stefan