GCD in Fractions

[Stefan Behnel]

Ian Kelly schrieb am 23.09.2014 um 19:39:
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote:
>> 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
> 
> I don't think documentation is sufficient in this case. This is the
> kind of thing though that is easy to forget about if you haven't read
> the documentation recently. And with a function like gcd, one
> generally wouldn't expect to *need* to read the documentation.

Interesting. I would definitely consult the documentation first thing if I
were considering to pass negative values into a gcd function - into any
implementation, even if I had been the very author myself, just two months
back. I might even take a look at the source to make sure the docs are
correct and up to date, and to look for comments that give further
insights. But maybe that's just me.

Stefan