3 ms·

Point taken that newbies are going to be confused that "odd / even == integer", but they'd be equally confused about why odd / even yields something close to wh

by scj 8y ago

Point taken that newbies are going to be confused that "odd / even == integer", but they'd be equally confused about why odd / even yields something close to what they expected but not quite (floating point errors). In both cases, they're probably going to be confused why an equality test a few lines later fails every once and a while. The concept of divide vs. div & mod is one that a programmer eventually needs to understand. More importantly, not everything should be optimized for newbies. The context driven / operator is appropriate in programming languages designed for experienced programmers. Upon further thought... Couldn't the argument be rephrased as "integers are broken numbers"? It sounds silly, but from a newbie's perspective the same problem exists with "int f = 38.2 * 25;".

OskarS 8y ago
The problem isn't necessarily that / does integer division: it's that it ONLY SOMETIMES does integer division. It should either always do proper division, or always do integer division, but not try and guess what the programmer wants. An example from C#: when I was a Unity developer, I frequently needed to figure out what the aspect ratio of the screen is. You'd think this would work: float aspect = Screen.width / Screen.height; since 99% of all parameters in Unity are 32 bit floats (common in gamedev). But no! Screen.width and Screen.height happen to be integers, so this particular line silently returns that the screen is actually square. I've literally run into this exact bug with Screen.width/height three or four different times. Every time I feel like an idiot, even though it's not my fault that C# inherited C's dumb division operator. Python does it correctly, and C-like languages should as well. Division used with two integers should always return a floating point number, and there should be a separate operator for integer division. It makes no sense the way it's done now.

by scj 8y ago

OskarS 8y ago

The problem isn't necessarily that / does integer division: it's that it ONLY SOMETIMES does integer division. It should either always do proper division, or always do integer division, but not try and guess what the programmer wants. An example from C#: when I was a Unity developer, I frequently needed to figure out what the aspect ratio of the screen is. You'd think this would work: float aspect = Screen.width / Screen.height; since 99% of all parameters in Unity are 32 bit floats (common in gamedev). But no! Screen.width and Screen.height happen to be integers, so this particular line silently returns that the screen is actually square. I've literally run into this exact bug with Screen.width/height three or four different times. Every time I feel like an idiot, even though it's not my fault that C# inherited C's dumb division operator. Python does it correctly, and C-like languages should as well. Division used with two integers should always return a floating point number, and there should be a separate operator for integer division. It makes no sense the way it's done now.