From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2002-12-28T13:52:42+09:00
Subject: Re: 1210 / 100 = 12? what?

On Sat, 28 Dec 2002 13:23:24 +0900, Pe�a, Botp wrote:
> Tom Sawyer [mailto:transami@transami.net] wrote:
>> no i didn't realize that. i thought ruby would automatically
>> change it to a float if need be, i.e. with divison, just as it
>> changes to Bignum if need be.
>> 
>> honestly i don't like it. now i have to go around adding .0's all
>> over the place to make sure the math comes out right. and in some
>> places i have to do things like multiple by 1.0 b/c certain
>> values come from cgi script variables i have no control over.
> (though I'm late in the thread) I'm in agreement. I like Ruby
> since it's supposed to be _closer_ to our minds ;-)

> When I scribble on a division, I should not be needing to append
> ".0" :-(
> Com'on, I thought we've passed thru 3GL langs (I admit I still
> love fortran and c, but I have to grow :-)...

This is one of the things where a statically typed language will do
the "right" thing but a dynamically typed language won't. The #/
method returns a new reference to a Fixnum object, because only
Fixnums are known as the receiver and message object. C et al. will
silently and automatically convert the integers to floating point
values.

What I'd actually like to see (and in some ways, this is Perl
wantarray envy) is this:

  (n, r) = 5 / 4 # n == 1, r == 1

In this way, I don't have to do:

  n = 5 / 4
  r = 5 % 4

It may not be any more efficient, but it looks cleaner. Sort of.
Perhaps something like this could be done:

  (n, r) = 5 // 4 # n == 1, r == 1

Introducing a new operator, #//.

I generally prefer integer or fixed-point operations over floating
point operations (greater accuracy at the cost of variable
precision), so I find them less surprising.

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2002.12.27 at 23.42.40