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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Python and Ruby Silently Discard Information? 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Ruby and Python aren't discarding information. Perl is adding information, but only when it thinks it should be added. After all, if 5/2 returns 2.5, why doesn't 4/2 return 2.0? Or so one could argue.

    It boils down to a design decision. Guido and Matz decided that if you want integer division, you get integer division. Larry took a DWIM approach.

    As a guy who doesn't care one way or the other really, I think Perl's approach is better for simple cases, and worse as you get into more complex operations.

    • > From a standards point of view, the Ruby and Perl behavior is IEEE compliant, while Perl's behavior is not

      Huh? (I assume by IEEE we are talking IEEE 754, the floating point standard...) This has nothing to do with compliancy of languages since the IEEE 754 specifies the representation and behaviour of floating point, not how programming languages understand numeric constants (are they integer or float) and arithmetic operations (is division truncating or not).
      • I was definitely parroting things I had read elsewhere on that point (as I indicated). I couldn't begin to tell you the relationship between IEEE and computer programming languages.

        If it's not a valid point, then so be it. But, I thought I would at least bring it up for discussion. It's definitely something I wouldn't mind hearing more argument/philosophy on.

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