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'.  The posting I was responding
to, by asserting that '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 and the former paragraph is moot.

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