Re: Greatest Common Divisor

On Mon, 20 Jan 2020 at 19:04, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>
> On 2020-Jan-20, Dean Rasheed wrote:
>
> > +       <entry>
> > +        greatest common divisor &mdash; the largest positive number that
> > +        divides both inputs with no remainder; returns <literal>0</literal> if
> > +        both inputs are zero
> > +       </entry>
>
> Warning, severe TOC/bikeshedding ahead.
>
> I don't know why, but this dash-semicolon sequence reads strange to me
> and looks out of place.  I would use parens for the first phrase and
> keep the semicolon, that is "greatest common divisor (the largest ...);
> returns 0 if ..."
>
> That seems more natural to me, and we're already using parens in other
> description <entry>s.
>

Hmm, OK. I suppose that's more logical because then the bit in parens
is the standard definition of gcd/lcm, and the part after the
semicolon is the implementation choice for the special case not
covered by the standard definition.

Regards,
Dean