Re: div bug
Re: div bug
- Subject: Re: div bug
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 12:12:05 -0400
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Doug McNutt<email@hidden> wrote:
> I have always wondered about that "learned in school" bit. I was certainly introduced to FORTRAN while still in school. (Well, I guess that was graduate school but FORTRAN was new.) Aren't students introduced to C or Pascal these days? Just what are all those K-12 computers used for?
Not to teach programming. Only geeks go into programming, you know.
Computers are for running software that someone else wrote. :\
> And certainly dividing 101.99999999995 by 1 in fourth grade would result in the sentence
>
> "One oh one with a remainder of .99999999995"
That's a silly answer to me; we never mixed decimals with remainders.
101.99999999995 divided by 1 is 101.99999999995, because any number
divided by 1 is itself.
You could say the quotient was 101 with a remainder of
19999999999/20000000000, I suppose. But our use of remainders was
limited to long division, and our use of modular arithmetic was
limited to clocks. The idea of dividing by 1 and taking the
remainder to get the fractional part of a number, or there existing a
form of division under which the integers formed a closed set, was not
something we were taught in school at all, at least not until college
CS classes.
--
Mark J. Reed <email@hidden>
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| References: | |
| | >Re: div bug (From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>) |
| | >Re: div bug (From: Philip Aker <email@hidden>) |