From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2004-06-04T22:59:07+09:00
Subject: Re: [RCR] Floating point division operator /. (or fdiv method)

On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 09:48:00AM +0900, Jim Weirich wrote:
> Robert Klemme wrote:
> >I strongly oppose that one: Operators are overloaded and if I have two
> >int's I want integer division, if I have to floats I want float division.
> >And I don't want that changed, because often code is written with integer
> >divisions in mind.  All sorts of indexing calculations depend on int math.
> 
> Then your code will break whenever it is used in a program that requires 
> "mathn".  You should always use div if you want integer division.

> The truth is that Ruby's / operator is broken.

I strongly disagree.  It is mathn that is broken, not the / operator.

I use / all the time to indicate integer division (provided I'm working
with integers).  My code will not work with mathn and I have no
intention of going out of my way to uglify my code just to make it
compatible with a broken library.

I've said it before and I will say it again.  Code that changes builtin
classes without a really good reason (YAML is one such example) is
broken.  See [ruby-talk:81923] for what I've written in the past on this
subject.

If we get selector namespaces in ruby 2.0, then mathn can be rewritten
such that users can get floating-point division with / in their
namespace only.  Until then I recommend not using mathn.

Paul