How to perform division in Go - math

I am trying to perform a simple division in Go.
fmt.Println(3/10)
This prints 0 instead of 0.3. This is kind of weird. Could someone please share what is the reason behind this? i want to perform different arithmetic operations in Go.
Thanks

The operands of the binary operation 3 / 10 are untyped constants. The specification says this about binary operations with untyped constants
if the operands of a binary operation are different kinds of untyped constants, the operation and, for non-boolean operations, the result use the kind that appears later in this list: integer, rune, floating-point, complex.
Because 3 and 10 are untyped integer constants, the value of the expression is an untyped integer (0 in this case).
To get a floating-point constant result, one of the operands must be a floating-point constant. The following expressions evaluate to the untyped floating-point constant 0.3:
3.0 / 10.0
3.0 / 10
3 / 10.0
When the division operation has an untyped constant operand and a typed operand, the typed operand determines the type of the expression. Ensure that the typed operand is a float64 to get a float64 result.
The expressions below convert int variables to a float64 to get the float64 result 0.3:
var i3 = 3
var i10 = 10
fmt.Println(float64(i3) / 10)
fmt.Println(3 / float64(i10))
Run a demonstration playground.

Related

Why does Julia return different results for equivalent expressions? 6÷2(1+2) and 6÷2*(1+2)

I typed the following in Julia's REPL:
julia> 6÷2(1+2)
1
julia> 6÷2*(1+2)
9
Why are the different results output?
Presh Talwalkar says 9 is correct in the movie
6÷2(1+2) = ? Mathematician Explains The Correct Answer - YouTube
YouTube notwithstanding, there is no correct answer. Which answer you get depends on what precedence convention you use to interpret the problem. Many of these viral "riddles" that go around periodically are contentious precisely because they are intentionally ambiguous. Not a math puzzle really, it's just a parsing problem. It's no deeper than someone saying a sentence with two interpretations. What do you do in that case in real life? You just ask which one they meant. This is no different. For this very reason, the ÷ symbol isn't often used in real mathematical notation—fraction notation is used instead, which clearly disambiguates this as either:
6
- (1 + 2) = 9
2
or as
6
--------- = 1
2 (1 + 2)
Regarding Julia specifically, this precedence behavior is documented here:
https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/integers-and-floating-point-numbers/#man-numeric-literal-coefficients
Specifically:
The precedence of numeric literal coefficients is slightly lower than that of unary operators such as negation. So -2x is parsed as (-2) * x and √2x is parsed as (√2) * x. However, numeric literal coefficients parse similarly to unary operators when combined with exponentiation. For example 2^3x is parsed as 2^(3x), and 2x^3 is parsed as 2*(x^3).
and the note:
The precedence of numeric literal coefficients used for implicit multiplication is higher than other binary operators such as multiplication (*), and division (/, \, and //). This means, for example, that 1 / 2im equals -0.5im and 6 // 2(2 + 1) equals 1 // 1.

Mathematical precision at 19th decimal place and beyond

I have the same set of data and am running the same code, but sometimes I get different results at the 19th decimal place and beyond. Although this is not a great concern to me for numbers less than 0.0001, it makes me wonder whether 19th decimal place is Raku's limit of precision?
Word 104 differ:
0.04948872986571077 19 chars
0.04948872986571079 19 chars
Word 105 differ:
0.004052062278212545 20 chars
0.0040520622782125445 21 chars
TL;DR See the doc's outstanding Numerics page.
(I had forgotten about that page before I wrote the following answer. Consider this answer at best a brief summary of a few aspects of that page.)
There are two aspects to this. Internal precision and printing precision.
100% internal precision until RAM is exhausted
Raku supports arbitrary precision number types. Quoting Wikipedia's relevant page:
digits of precision are limited only by the available memory of the host system
You can direct Raku to use one of its arbitrary precision types.[1] If you do so it will retain 100% precision until it runs out of RAM.
Arbitrary precision type
Corresponding type checking[2]
Example of value of that type
Int
my Int $foo ...
66174449004242214902112876935633591964790957800362273
FatRat
my FatRat $foo ...
66174449004242214902112876935633591964790957800362273 / 13234889800848443102075932929798260216894990083844716
Thus you can get arbitrary internal precision for integers and fractions (including arbitrary precision decimals).
Limited internal precision
If you do not direct Raku to use an arbitrary precision number type it will do its best but may ultimately switch to limited precision. For example, Raku will give up on 100% precision if a formula you use calculates a Rat and the number's denominator exceeds 64 bits.[1]
Raku's fall back limited precision number type is Num:
On most platforms, [a Num is] an IEEE 754 64-bit floating point numbers, aka "double precision".
Quoting the Wikipedia page for that standard:
Floating point is used ... when a wider range is needed ... even if at the cost of precision.
The 53-bit significand precision gives from 15 to 17 significant decimal digits precision (2−53 ≈ 1.11 × 10−16).
Printing precision
Separate from internal precision is stringification of numbers.
(It was at this stage that I remembered the doc page on Numerics linked at the start of this answer.)
Quoting Printing rationals:
Keep in mind that output routines like say or put ... may choose to display a Num as an Int or a Rat number. For a more definitive string to output, use the raku method or [for a rational number] .nude
Footnotes
[1] You control the type of a numeric expression via the types of individual numbers in the expression, and the types of the results of numeric operations, which in turn depend on the types of the numbers. Examples:
1 + 2 is 3, an Int, because both 1 and 2 are Ints, and a + b is an Int if both a and b are Ints;
1 / 2 is not an Int even though both 1 and 2 are individually Ints, but is instead 1/2 aka 0.5, a Rat.
1 + 4 / 2 will print out as 3, but the 3 is internally a Rat, not an Int, due to Numeric infectiousness.
[2] All that enforcement does is generate a run-time error if you try to assign or bind a value that is not of the numeric type you've specified as the variable's type constraint. Enforcement doesn't mean that Raku will convert numbers for you. You have to write your formulae to ensure the result you get is what you want.[1] You can use coercion -- but coercion cannot regain precision that's already been lost.

Easier way to convert a character to an integer?

Still getting a feel for what's in the Julia standard library. I can convert strings to their integer representation via the Int() constructor, but when I call Int() with a Char I don't integer value of a digit:
julia> Int('3')
51
Currently I'm calling string() first:
intval = Int(string(c)) # doesn't work anymore, see note below
Is this the accepted way of doing this? Or is there a more standard method? It's coming up quite a bit in my Project Euler exercise.
Note: This question was originally asked before Julia 1.0. Since it was asked the int function was renamed to Int and became a method of the Int type object. The method Int(::String) for parsing a string to an integer was removed because of the potentially confusing difference in behavior between that and Int(::Char) discussed in the accepted answer.
The short answer is you can do parse(Int, c) to do this correctly and efficiently. Read on for more discussion and details.
The code in the question as originally asked doesn't work anymore because Int(::String) was removed from the languge because of the confusing difference in behavior between it and Int(::Char). Prior to Julia 1.0, the former was parsing a string as an integer whereas the latter was giving the unicode code point of the character which meant that Int("3") would return 3 whereaas Int('3') would return 51. The modern working equivalent of what the questioner was using would be parse(Int, string(c)). However, you can skip converting the character to a string (which is quite inefficient) and just write parse(Int, c).
What does Int(::Char) do and why does Int('3') return 51? That is the code point value assigned to the character 3 by the Unicode Consortium, which was also the ASCII code point for it before that. Obviously, this is not the same as the digit value of the letter. It would be nice if these matched, but they don't. The code points 0-9 are a bunch of non-printing "control characters" starting with the NUL byte that terminates C strings. The code points for decimal digits are at least contiguous, however:
julia> [Int(c) for c in "0123456789"]
10-element Vector{Int64}:
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
Because of this you can compute the value of a digit by subtracting the code point of 0 from it:
julia> [Int(c) - Int('0') for c in "0123456789"]
10-element Vector{Int64}:
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Since subtraction of Char values works and subtracts their code points, this can be simplified to [c-'0' for c in "0123456789"]. Why not do it this way? You can! That is exactly what you'd do in C code. If you know your code will only ever encounter c values that are decimal digits, then this works well. It doesn't, however, do any error checking whereas parse does:
julia> c = 'f'
'f': ASCII/Unicode U+0066 (category Ll: Letter, lowercase)
julia> parse(Int, c)
ERROR: ArgumentError: invalid base 10 digit 'f'
Stacktrace:
[1] parse(::Type{Int64}, c::Char; base::Int64)
# Base ./parse.jl:46
[2] parse(::Type{Int64}, c::Char)
# Base ./parse.jl:41
[3] top-level scope
# REPL[38]:1
julia> c - '0'
54
Moreover, parse is a bit more flexible. Suppose you want to accept f as a hex "digit" encoding the value 15. To do that with parse you just need to use the base keyword argument:
julia> parse(Int, 'f', base=16)
15
julia> parse(Int, 'F', base=16)
15
As you can see it parses upper or lower case hex digits correctly. In order to do that with the subtraction method, your code would need to do something like this:
'0' <= c <= '9' ? c - '0' :
'A' <= c <= 'F' ? c - 'A' + 10 :
'a' <= c <= 'f' ? c - 'a' + 10 : error()
Which is actually quite close to the implementation of the parse(Int, c) method. Of course at that point it's much clearer and easier to just call parse(Int, c) which does this for you and is well optimized.

What is the upper bound of Integer in Haskell?

I was solving a math problem: want to get the sum of the digits of the number 2^1000.
In Java, the solution is like:
String temp = BigInteger.ONE.shiftLeft(1000).toString();
int sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < temp.length(); i++)
sum += temp.charAt(i) - '0';
Then came up a solution in Haskell, like this:
digitSum ::(Integral a) => a -> a
digitSum 0 = 0
digitSum n = (mod n 10) + (digitSum (div n 10))
The whole process is pretty smooth, one point seems interesting, we know integer type can not handle 2 ^ 1000, too big, in Java, it's obvious to use BigInteger and treat the big number to string, but in Haskell, no compiling errors means the 2 ^ 1000 could be passed in directly. Here is the thing, does Haskell transform the number into string internally? I want to make sure what the type is and let the compiler to determine, then I type the following lines in GHCi:
Prelude> let i = 2 ^ 1000
Prelude> i
107150860718626732094842504906000181056140481170553360744375038837035105112493612249319
837881569585812759467291755314682518714528569231404359845775746985748039345677748242309
854210746050623711418779541821530464749835819412673987675591655439460770629145711964776
86542167660429831652624386837205668069376
Prelude> :t i
i :: Integer
Here, I was totally confused, apparently, the number of i is oversized, but the return type of i is still Integer. How could we explain this and what's the upper bound or limit of Integer of Haskell?
In Haskell, Integer is a - theoretically - unbounded integer type. Fixed-width types are Int, Int8, Int16, Int32, Int64 and the corresponding unsigned Word, Word8 etc.
In practice, even Integer is of course bounded, by the available memory for instance, or by the internal representation.
By default, GHC uses the GMP package to represent Integer, and that means the bound is 2^(2^37) or so, since GMP uses a 32-bit integer to store the number of limbs.

Prolog =:= operator

There are some special operators in Prolog, one of them is is, however, recently I came across the =:= operator and have no idea how it works.
Can someone explain what this operator does, and also where can I find a predefined list of such special operators and what they do?
I think the above answer deserves a few words of explanation here nevertheless.
A short note in advance: Arithmetic expressions in Prolog are just terms ("Everything is a term in Prolog"), which are not evaluated automatically. (If you have a Lisp background, think of quoted lists). So 3 + 4 is just the same as +(3,4), which does nothing on its own. It is the responsibility of individual predicates to evaluate those terms.
Several built-in predicates do implicit evaluation, among them the arithmetic comparsion operators like =:= and is. While =:= evaluates both arguments and compares the result, is accepts and evaluates only its right argument as an arithmetic expression.
The left argument has to be an atom, either a numeric constant (which is then compared to the result of the evaluation of the right operand), or a variable. If it is a bound variable, its value has to be numeric and is compared to the right operand as in the former case. If it is an unbound variable, the result of the evaluation of the right operand is bound to that variable. is is often used in this latter case, to bind variables.
To pick up on an example from the above linked Prolog Dictionary: To test if a number N is even, you could use both operators:
0 is N mod 2 % true if N is even
0 =:= N mod 2 % dito
But if you want to capture the result of the operation you can only use the first variant. If X is unbound, then:
X is N mod 2 % X will be 0 if N is even
X =:= N mod 2 % !will bomb with argument/instantiation error!
Rule of thumb: If you just need arithmetic comparison, use =:=. If you want to capture the result of an evaluation, use is.
?- 2+3 =:= 6-1.
true.
?- 2+3 is 6-1.
false.
Also please see docs http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?predicate=is/2
Complementing the existing answers, I would like to state a few additional points:
An operator is an operator
First of all, the operator =:= is, as the name indicates, an operator. In Prolog, we can use the predicate current_op/3 to learn more about operators. For example:
?- current_op(Prec, Type, =:=).
Prec = 700,
Type = xfx.
This means that the operator =:= has precedence 700 and is of type xfx. This means that it is a binary infix operator.
This means that you can, if you want, write a term like =:=(X, Y) equivalently as X =:= Y. In both cases, the functor of the term is =:=, and the arity of the term is 2. You can use write_canonical/1 to verify this:
?- write_canonical(a =:= b).
=:=(a,b)
A predicate is not an operator
So far, so good! This has all been a purely syntactical feature. However, what you are actually asking about is the predicate (=:=)/2, whose name is =:= and which takes 2 arguments.
As others have already explained, the predicate (=:=)/2 denotes arithmetic equality of two arithmetic expressions. It is true iff its arguments evaluate to the same number.
For example, let us try the most general query, by which we ask for any solution whatsoever, using variables as arguments:
?- X =:= Y.
ERROR: Arguments are not sufficiently instantiated
Hence, this predicate is not a true relation, since we cannot use it for generating results! This is a quite severe drawback of this predicate, clashing with what you commonly call "declarative programming".
The predicate only works in the very specific situation that both arguments are fully instantiated. For example:
?- 1 + 2 =:= 3.
true.
We call such predicates moded because they can only be used in particular modes of usage. For the vast majority of beginners, moded predicates are a nightmare to use, because they require you to think about your programs procedurally, which is quite hard at first and remains hard also later. Also, moded predicates severely limit the generality of your programs, because you cannot use them on all directions in which you could use pure predicates.
Constraints are a more general alternative
Prolog also provides much more general arithmetic predicates in the form of arithmetic constraints.
For example, in the case of integers, try your Prolog system's CLP(FD) constraints. One of the most important CLP(FD) constraints denotes arithmetic equality and is called (#=)/2. In complete analogy to (=:=)/2, the operator (#=)/2 is also defined as an infix operator, and so you can write for example:
| ?- 1 + 2 #= 3.
yes
I am using GNU Prolog as one particular example, and many other Prolog systems also provide CLP(FD) implementations.
A major attraction of constraints is found in their generality. For example, in contrast to (=:=)/2, we get with the predicate (#=)/2:
| ?- X + 2 #= 3.
X = 1
| ?- 1 + Y #= 3.
Y = 2
And we can even ask the most general query:
| ?- X #= Y.
X = _#0(0..268435455)
Y = _#0(0..268435455)
Note how naturally these predicates blend into Prolog and act as relations between integer expressions that can be queried in all directions.
Depending on the domain of interest, my recommendition is to use CLP(FD), CLP(Q), CLP(B) etc. instead of using more low-level arithmetic predicates.
Also see clpfd, clpq and clpb for more information.
Coincidentally, the operator =:= is used by CLP(B) with a completely different meaning:
?- sat(A =:= B+1).
A = 1,
sat(B=:=B).
This shows that you must distinguish between operators and predicates. In the above case, the predicate sat/1 has interpreted the given expression as a propositional formula, and in this context, =:= denotes equality of Boolean expressions.
I found my own answer, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~billw/prologdict.html
Its an ISO core standard predicate operator, which cannot be bootstrapped from unification (=)/2 or syntactic equality (==)/2. It is defined in section 8.7 Arithmetic Comparison. And it basically behaves as follows:
E =:= F :-
X is E,
Y is F,
arithmetic_compare(=, X, Y).
So both the left hand side (LHS) and right hand side (RHS) must be arithmetic expressions that are evaluted before they are compared. Arithmetic comparison can compare across numeric types. So we have:
GNU Prolog 1.4.5 (64 bits)
?- 0 = 0.0.
no
?- 0 == 0.0
no
?- 0 =:= 0.0.
yes
From Erlang I think it could be good to annotate that as syntax are mostly look alike to Prolog.
=:= expression is meaning of exactly equal.
such as in JavaScript you can use === to also see if the type of the variables are same.
Basically it's same logic but =:= is used in functional languages as Prolog, Erlang.
Not much information but hope it could help in some way.
=:= is a comparison operator.A1 =:= A2 succeeds if values of expressions A1 and A2 are equal.
A1 == A2 succeeds if terms A1 and A2 are identical;

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