On 04 April 2000, Ka-Ping Yee said:
On Tue, 4 Apr 2000 gvwilson@nevex.com wrote:
(BTW, I think '/' vs. '//' is going to be as error-prone as '=' vs. '==', but harder to track down, since you'll have to scrutinize values very carefully to spot the difference. Haven't done any field tests, though...)
My favourite symbol for integer division is _/ (read it as "floor-divide"). It makes visually apparent what is going on.
Gaackk! Why is this even an issue? As I recall, Pascal got it right 30 years ago: / is what you learned in grade school (1/2 = 0.5), div is what you learn in first-year undergrad CS (1/2 = 0). Either add a "div" operator or a "div()" builtin to Python and you take care of the spelling issue. (The fixing-old-code issue is another problem entirely.) I think that means I favour keeping operator.div and the __div__() method as-is, and adding operator.fdiv (?) and __fdiv__ for "floating-point" division. In other words: 5 div 3 = 5.__div__(3) = operator.div(5,3) = 1 5 / 3 = 5.__fdiv__(3) = operator.fdiv(5,3) = 1.6666667 (where I have used artistic license in applying __div__ to actual numbers -- you know what I mean). -1 on adding any non-7-bit-ASCII characters to the character set required to express Python; +0 on allowing any (alphanumeric) Unicode character in identifiers (all for Py3k). Not sure what "alphanumeric" means in Unicode, but I'm sure someone has worried about this. Greg