Re: Arbitrary precision modulo operation

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 02:01:00 -0400,
  Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Paul Tillotson <pntil@shentel.net> writes:
> > mod(x, y) is computed as x - trunc(x / y) * y in the mod_var() function
>
> It could be that select_div_scale needs to allow some more slop, or that
> that routine is okay but mod_var shouldn't depend on it to select the
> intermediate result scale for its internal division.  Comments?

One option would be to define a separate division operator that always
returns an integral value and that is truncated toward 0 and use that
for the mod function. People might find this operator useful in itself.

Another option would be for mod to check if the remainder doesn't have the
same sign as the divisor and if so keeping adding the divisor to it until
it does.