Re: [bug-gawk] GAWK 4.1: Division with Arbitrary Precision Integers

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 01:01:40AM -0400, Katherine Wasserman wrote:
> There is currently no way to preform division of arbitrary precision integers 
> in gawk, the system will always convert numbers to floating point when using 
> the '/' operator.  
> 
> Per Aharon , there appear to be at least two ways around this:
> 
> 1) change the semantics of the '/' operator.

I don't think we could change the behavior of the '/' operator unless we
introduced a new option to select this behavior.  That doesn't sound
workable to me...

> 2) introduce a new function for integer division.
> 
> I think that the later is both cleaner and useful as a function even without 
> the MPFR/MP extensions loaded.

I think this is the right solution.  There is a "div" function in
ISO C that does what we want:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/div.html

Perhaps something like div(numerator, denominator, result) where
the result will be an array with a "quot" element and a "rem"
element.  I don't think it's possible to have a function that returns
an array, but I'm not certain...

Regards,
Andy