Stephen,

Interesting insight. Thanks for pointing this out.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Stephen Pair
> Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 4:11 PM
> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> Subject: Re: [Curious] Integer division => fraction
> 
> 
> Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> >Hi Guys,
> >
> >Just had an interesting discussion with Dean (over on 
> e-Lang) about integer
> >division semantics. He pointed out (and I agree) that most 
> people tend to
> >find it it confusing that "3/4" results in a fraction rather 
> than coercing
> >to Float by default.
> >
> >My questions: What do you think about this issue? Are you personally
> >surprised if you get a fraction back? Has it bitten you in unexpected
> >places? Have you actually ever had the need for coercing to fractions
> >instead of floats? Can you think of "typical" applications 
> that would be
> >harmed by coercing to floats?
> >
> 
> I think there are many applications that could be harmed by 
> the loss of 
> precision.  If you need a float and are willing to deal with 
> the loss of 
> precision, it's better to be explicit about that (by sending 
> #asFloat) 
> than it is to implicitly lose precision at arbitrary places in a 
> computation. 
> 
> I also don't think that most people find it confusing to get 
> a fraction 
> (at least not anyone familiar with object oriented programming and 
> mathematics). What I think might actually be causing 
> confusion is trying 
> to think in terms of fractions...not the fact that the result is 
> internally represented as a fraction.
> 
> One thing that might alleviate some of this confusion is to have a 
> preference that would cause fractions to be displayed as 
> floats (in the 
> inspectors for example)...I actually find myself sending #asFloat to 
> fractions from time to time just to see a fraction in a 
> floating point 
> representation...its hard to digest big fractions like: "( 
> 34123412341234124 / 14312431343 )"...it's much easier to think about 
> this fraction as: 2384179.98476013.  This is especially true 
> when you're 
> looking at multiple fractions and trying to guage their relative 
> magnitudes when their reductions have different denominators.
> 
> Unfortunately, there might be some unsuspecting and casual users of 
> #printString that might get bitten if the preference were 
> enabled.  But, 
> it couldn't hurt to try it...it would be interesting to see if the 
> confusion is alleviated by simply changing the presentation of the 
> fraction in some key places.
> 
> - Stephen
> 
> 
> 
>