As a Mathematician I would like:

[S.]

Stephen Montgomery-Smith Wrote:

> 2. a%b has a very definite and unambiguous meaning when a is negative, 
> and b is positive. The output should be non-negative. This is something 
> perl has done right.  For example (-6)%7 is 1.

That's not true.  There is two definitions of the 'mod' operator for negative numbers.  Depends on how you define the operator itself.

-6%7 is equally 1 or -6. 

Long division makes extensive use of remainders for calculations, if you were to say the initial calculation was 7*-1 remainder 1, then you would have a very wrong answer doing division by hand.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulo_operation
and http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52343.html