Re: Integer division semantics; Ada

[weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Matthew P. Wiener)]

Perhaps the following belongs to e-mail only, but I'm willing to apologize
for the gratuitous Ada-bashing.  I was rather stunned at the attitude that
"Ada does it that way so it must be right" in the posting I had ridiculed.

In article <728@harvard.UUCP> macrakis@harvard.UUCP (Stavros Macrakis) writes:
>In a discussion of division standards, Matthew P. Wiener
>(weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU) brings up some questions about the role
>of Ada:
>					<11610@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
>> ...many of the largest defense companies/contractors consider Ada to
>> be a complete joke and have no intention of making it available
>> unless their programmers start screaming and begging for it.
>
>You appear to have a strange model of programming language choice.
>Do you have some documentation for your claims?

It comes from talking to numerous people who work at such places over
the years.  Condescension and derision were the usual attitude, and I
was passing it along.  Comments like "Didn't DoD have the same hopes
for COBOL? Hardy Har Har." were typical.

I should emphasize this attitude does not reflect on the language so much
as on the DoD == fubar equation.

>> ... Besides, I wouldn't be surprised if they chose the boneheaded
>> way of doing integer division for idiotic reasons anyway. ...  [And
>> to net.lang.ada readers: sorry for picking on Ada, but I realize
>> many of you have no choice in the matter anyway.]
>
>Insults and condescension don't help your argument.

Then I'll say it politely: the mathematically boneheaded way of doing
integer division does not seem to have much inherently logical reasons
for being adopted, yet it is nearly universal in computer languages.  The
article I was replying to asked why hadn't I or others who care about the
matter given input to the language when we had the chance.  I suspect that
such input was ignored--the discussion on integer division has mostly re-
vealed "idiotic reasons" for supporting the traditional implementation--and
I wouldn't be surprised if they followed the tradition.

But it seems Ada has both 'mod' and 'rem': but the posting I was responding
to ('rem' is the winner in the great integer division debate since Ada does
it that way) seemed to imply that it only had 'rem'.  So I stand corrected.

ucbvax!brahms!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720