> Today I got very subtly bitten by // truncating towards negative infinity
> rather than zero, e.g.,
> 
>     3//2 -> 1
>    -3//2 -> -2
> 
> whereas:
> 
>     3 quo: 2 -> 1
>    -3 quo: 2 -> -1
> 
> The reason I got bitten is that the C translator generates // as C / which
> has the semantics of #quo:. 

I'm pretty sure that in ANSI C the behavior is implementation defined. 
So don't count on it doing one way or the other. 

The reason other languages round to negative infinity -- not that I'm
saying whether this is a good idea :) -- is to make // and \\ work
nicely together.  That is, \\ can now give a proper remainder even with
negative arguments:

	self should: [ a  =  ((a // b) * b  +  (a \\ b)) ]

The other way to make // and \\ consistent is to give back negative
answers for \\ sometimes.  IMHO that would be even more weird than
having // round towards negative infinity, but indeed that's how quo:
and remainder: manage to work so nicely together.

	self should: [ a  =  ((a quo: b) * b  +  (a remainder: b)) ]
	
	

-Lex