Define remainder (and/or modulo)
domenic opened this issue · 2 comments
What is the issue with the Infra Standard?
whatwg/streams#1145 wants to use the equivalent of JavaScript's % operator. This is surprisingly subtle because of the difference between modulo and remainder. See discussion in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Remainder .
I suggest the terminology "the [remainder after dividing] |dividend| by |divisor|".
I also suggest that we add a clear note about how this maps to some language's % operator (JavaScript, C, C++) but mismatches others (Python, Perl).
There might also be some subtlety here about rounding toward 0 vs. not?
We should probably delegate the actual definition to https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-numeric-types-number-remainder , although I guess ideally we'd figure out #87 first.
/cc @MattiasBuelens
See also https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/#terminology for some (potentially different) precedent.
whatwg/streams#1145 wants to use the equivalent of JavaScript's % operator. This is surprisingly subtle because of the difference between modulo and remainder.
For Streams, the difference doesn't matter, since we only ever have positive dividends and divisors. From a quick look at Encoding, I think the same applies there.