showing Ratios
Doug McIlroy
doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Thu Feb 25 09:54:04 EST 2010
Very minor library change to promote readability of output:
eliminate spaces in the string representation of Ratios.
Currently, a Ratio appears as a pair separated by " % ".
The spaces that flank "%" make for confusing output.
Example:
[1 % 2,1 % 3,1 % 4,1 % 5,1 % 6]
The spaces suggest that "," binds more tightly than "%".
I claim that
[1%2,1%3,1%4,1%5,1%6]
is much more readable. It also saves paper and/or screen area.
I suspect that the spaces came in to make it easier to find
the division point in a lugubrious Ratio like
123456789%987654321
True enough, but such numbers are too incomprehensible
to get much scrutiny anyway. I, at least, find that all
I do with Ratios much more complicated than 355%113 is
squirrel them away in tables that only a computer is
likely to read seriously, or edit them into some other
form, e.g. for Sloane's Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
Doug McIlroy
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