On Jan 25, 2008, at 1:22 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote: > I wouldn't fret about this too much. Intrepreting int(f) as > meaning truncate has a *long* history in *many* programming > languages. It is a specious argument int(f) is ambiguous. > No one thinks it means ceil(f).
Not that I think my opinion will have any weight in this discussion, but I'd agree that int has a long history not likely to be misinterpreted when applied to real numbers. Quoting from Graham, Knuth and Patashnik "Concrete Mathematics...2nd edition" page 67: "We start by covering the floor (greatest integer) and ceiling (least integer) functions, which are defined for all real x... ...some pocket calculators have an INT function, defined as floor(x) when x is positive and ceil(x) when x is negative. The designers of these calculators probably wanted their INT function to satisfy the identity INT(-X) = -INT(X). But we'll stick to our floor and ceiling functions, because they have even nicer properties than this." jared _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
