negative integer division

[Carl Banks]

Jive Dadson wrote:
> > Now, I'll agree with you if you want to argue that some machines do
> > negative integer division in stupifyingly horrible ways.
>
> That's why I think it was a stupifyingly horrible decision.
> Understandable, but in the end an s.h.d. nonetheless.


C language is chock-full of things that are stupidly horrible
decisions.  This is one of very least of them.

The philosophy of C was to turn opeations into one or two instructions,
if they could.  Just about any operator in C can be, and having /
invoke a small subprogram would have been the absolute wrong thing to
do.  The other philosophy of C was to make it easy for the programmer
to hand-optimize stuff.  Which means no way was it going to force the
programmer to use quick_div to get the division in two instructions.
It was the right decision.

I would say that a better thing to call this is a stupidly horrible
circumstance.  The circumstance is that an archaic language designed to
be hand-optimized and has unfortuntate importabilities has ever became
everyone's shizzle.

(I'm hating C today; I was asked to write something in C and I can't
use anything else because someone has to use to code.)


-- 
CARL BANKS