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 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
