> They recognize modular arithmetic but for some reason insist that > there is no such _binary operation_. But as I said, I don't understand > their concern. (Except the related concern about some programming > languages, not Python, where the remainder does not behave well with > respect to division.)
They might not be willing to define it, but as soon as we programmers do, well, we did. Having studied the contemporary philosophy of mathematics, their concern is probably that in their minds, mathematics is whatever some dead guy said it was, and they dont know of any dead guy ever talking about a modulus operation, so therefore it 'does not exist'. Whatever you want to call the concept we are talking about, or whether you care to talk about it at all, it is most certainly a binary operation, since there are two arguments involved. There is no way around that. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
