Steven D'Aprano writes: > On Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:56:02 +0200, Jussi Piitulainen wrote: > > I'm not misunderstanding any argument. There was no > > argument. There was a blanket pronouncement that _in mathematics_ > > mod is not a binary operator. I should learn to challenge such > > pronouncements and ask what the problem is. Maybe next time. > > So this was *one* person making that claim?
I've seen it a few times from a few different posters, all on Usenet or whatever this thing is nowadays called. I think I was careful to say _some_ mathematicians, but not careful to check that any of them were actually mathematicians speaking as mathematicians. The context seems to be a cultural divide between maths and cs. Too much common ground yet very different interests? > I understand that, in general, mathematicians don't have much need > for a remainder function in the same way programmers do -- modulo > arithmetic is far more important. But there's a world of difference > between saying "In mathematics, extracting the remainder is not > important enough to be given a special symbol and treated as an > operator" and saying "remainder is not a binary operator". The first > is reasonable; the second is not. Yes. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
