How does Ruby interpret exponents when using integers vs floats?

Question

Here's an illustration of what I'm asking about:

enter image description here

I'm just curious about how Ruby is interpreting these problems, which are clearly different as far as Ruby is concerned. I became curious when I was trying to write a simple math problem without using floats and noted that Ruby would read Floats differently than their Integer counterpart (perhaps 1/2 isn't 0.5's counterpart as far as Ruby is concerned, but that's part of what I'm asking here: why not?).

Can anyone explain what's going on here?

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 01 '15 at 18:05

6

17424 ** 1 / 2 is interpreted as (17424 ** 1) / 2, which is just 17424/2
17424 ** (1 / 2) is counter-intuitive because 1 / 2 is actually 0, not 0.5. This is because when you divide integers, the result's decimal is truncated. You can change one of the operands (or both) to a float to fix this: 17424 ** (1.0 / 2)

answered Feb 01 '15 at 18:05

August

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Thank you, that makes total sense to me now. – Proto Feb 01 '15 at 18:41

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

3

17424 ** 1 / 2
    17424  / 2
         8712


17424 ** (1/2)
17424 **   0
      1

/ of two integers is an integer. See also: Why is division in Ruby returning an integer instead of decimal value?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

Community

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answered Feb 01 '15 at 18:03

Karol S

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How does Ruby interpret exponents when using integers vs floats?

2 Answers2