From: antispam@fricas.org   
      
   Arne Vajhøj  wrote:   
   > On 8/18/2025 8:48 PM, Dan Cross wrote:   
   >> In article <68a3b980$0$713$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>,   
   >> Arne Vajhøj   wrote:   
   >>> But point is that one need to know something about the   
   >>> languages.   
   >>>   
   >>> Just picking an operator that "looks like" and hope it   
   >>> has similar semantics is no good.   
   >>   
   >> This seems like a very extreme example.  There is a scale of   
   >> knowledge when it comes to programming languages, from the basic   
   >> ways in which one does various things like write loops or   
   >> perform basic arithmetic, to the minutia of specific library or   
   >> IO routines, with semantics of specific operators and how they   
   >> combine probably somewhere in the middle.   
   >>   
   >> I happen to disagree with Simon's notion of what makes for   
   >> robust programming, but to go to such an extreme as to suggest   
   >> that writing code as if logical operators don't short-circuit   
   >> is the same as not knowing the semantics of division is   
   >> specious.   
   >   
   > There are 4 operations:   
   > - short circuiting and   
   > - non short circuiting and   
   > - integer division   
   > - floating point division   
      
   There is a lot of different integer divisions:   
   - "correct one", that is producing a fraction   
   - rounding quotient up   
   - rounding quotient down   
   - rounding quotient to 0   
   - rounding quotient at half with ties going to even   
   - with positive remainder   
   - with remainder of smallest absolute value and in case of ties positive   
      
   There are various behaviours on overflow and in case of zero divisor.   
      
   > Both source and target language has a way of doing those: operator,   
   > function or a more complex expression.   
   >   
   > I agree that the risk of someone not understanding "division"   
   > ways is much less than the risk of someone not understanding   
   > "and" ways.   
      
   Well, division is much more complex than boolean operations, so   
   harder to understand.  OTOH details of division are are harder   
   to ignore than details of boolean operations.   
      
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