How do you calculate div and mod of floating point numbers?

Posted by boost on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by boost
Published on 2009-01-30T06:52:21Z Indexed on 2010/05/09 21:08 UTC
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In Perl, the % operator seems to assume integers. For instance:

sub foo {
    my $n1 = shift;
    my $n2 = shift;
    print "perl's mod=" . $n1 % $n2, "\n";
    my $res = $n1 / $n2;
    my $t = int($res);
    print "my div=$t", "\n";
    $res = $res - $t;
    $res = $res * $n2;
    print "my mod=" . $res . "\n\n";
}   

foo( 3044.952963, 7.1 );
foo( 3044.952963, -7.1 );
foo( -3044.952963, 7.1 );
foo( -3044.952963, -7.1 );

gives

perl's mod=6
my div=428
my mod=6.15296300000033

perl's mod=-1
my div=-428
my mod=6.15296300000033

perl's mod=1
my div=-428
my mod=-6.15296300000033

perl's mod=-6
my div=428
my mod=-6.15296300000033

Now as you can see, I've come up with a "solution" already for calculating div and mod. However, what I don't understand is what effect the sign of each argument should have on the result. Wouldn't the div always be positive, being the number of times n2 fits into n1? How's the arithmetic supposed to work in this situation?

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