A use for integer quotients

[Stephen Horne]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2001 04:41:49 GMT, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
wrote:

>Well, so far the only arguments I've heard come down to
>
>(1) int/int *ought* to return an int;

...

>IMO, argument (1) is misguided.  I've heard all the variations many
>times by now and none are convincing to me; they are either wrong,
>like "that's how mathematicians define it" or "that's how all
>right-thinking programming languages define it", or they miss the
>point, like "it's easy to explain to newbies that int/int returns
>int".

Please read my 'Steve Summary' message - it addresses all these and
more.

If you can prove that the set of mathematicians only includes those
who are dealing with the currently interesting discrete-mathematics
problems, or you can prove that magically warping discrete measures
into continuous measures is useful for typical bread-and-butter
programming tasks, I'd be interested to hear it.

I define a mathematician as someone who applies mathematics, and who
understands the mathematical principles being applied. I don't limit
it to people working in field theory or some such, however interesting
it may be and however pervasive it may be in current
college/university study and specialist application of discrete
mathematics. Any narrowing of that definition should be explicit or at
least for day-to-day practical reasons.

I define practical as the normal case, not the first-day newbies
expectations and not specialist fields.