PEP0238 lament

[Steve Horne]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2001 18:18:43 +1200, Greg Ewing
<greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

>Arthur_Siegel at rsmi.com wrote:
>> 
>> If I was told that experinced programmers might
>> appreciate this change for any possible reason -
>> I'd be quiet as a mouse.
>
>I'm an experienced programmer, and I appreciate the
>change on the grounds that different operations on
>the same data should be spelled differently.

It's not a different operation on the same data. It's the same
operation on a different datatype. Floating point division simply
extends integer division to some extend past the point - quite
appropriate when dealing with floats, but extending a principle is not
the same as defining a fundamentally different operation.

You might as well claim floating point addition is different from
integer addition - that also requires a different algorithm and gives
a different result.

But that is only a small part of the problem. The real problem is
compatability.

You disagree? - then may the bugs of a thousand divisions infest your
code forever ;-)

-- 
Steve Horne
Home : steve at lurking.demon.co.uk
Work : sh at ttsoftware.co.uk