What other languages, beside Transact SQL, state that 22/7 is equal to 3?

Question

I was using Microsoft SQL Query Analyzer the other day and wrote a very simple select statement:

SELECT 22/7 as [PI Equiv]

I was suprized that the result was 3, when I was expecting to see 3.1428571. Even if you declare the output to be Numeric(18,7), you still get 3.0000000.

DECLARE @Answer Numeric(18,7)
SET @Answer = 22/7
SELECT @Answer as [PI Equiv]

RESULT = 3.0000000

What other languages return integer values when the dividend and divisor are both integers?

Answer 1

Most languages that supports integer arithmetic will give you 3 from the calculation 22/7. This includes, C, C++, C#, Ada, Java, etc. The exceptions appear to be Pascal, VB and Lisp that do floating point arithmetic by default.

Languages where you have implicit typing may give you a floating point result instead, though I would check it first.

However, it's bad programming practice and if you mean floating point division you should make at least one of the values explicitly floating point:

pi = 22.0 / 7;

Answer 2

You didn't specifically ask, but I thought I'd add that if you don't want an integer result you do this:

SELECT 22/7.0 as [PI Equiv]

or

SELECT 22/cast(7 as numeric (18.2)) as [PI Equiv]

Casting an output variable did nothing because the calculation is done before the variable value is set. Division in SQL should explicitly specify that one of the elements is a decimal if you want a decimal result. You also should almost never do a division without a case statement to make sure that the divide by 0 possibility will be handled unless the divisor is a hardcoded value such as the 7 in your calculation.

declare @somenumber numeric(18,2)
set @somenumber = 0
SELECT CASE where  @somenumber = 0 then null else 22/@somenumber end as [PI Equiv]

Answer 3

In integer arithmetic, the remainder is ignored. This is standard behaviour in most modern languages, initially included in programming languages due to hardware limitations and performance constraints.

For historic and performance reasons, this behaviour is present in most modern languages/platforms; you'll have to go out of your way to find a language which doesn't behave in this manner (examples of exceptions include some experiments with Smalltalk and related).

Answer 4

Python 2.x (without the -Q new option or from __future__ import division)

>>> 22/7
3

bash

$ expr 22 / 7
3

Java

class Div{
    public static void main( String[] args ) {
        int x = 22/7;
        System.out.println( "22/7=" + x );
    }
}

$ java Div
22/7=3