The mod operator isn't the solution to that problem, but that problem shoves integer division in your face. If a dev sees that and isn't curious enough to understand there is a division operator and a remainder operator, just like when you studied fractions in 3rd grade, I don't know that I want to work with that person.
And every dev should have hit the remainder operator at bare minimum when they had a long running loop and wanted to print a status every kth operation, eg
for(int i=0; i < 100000000; i++){
// some operation
if(i % 100000 == 0)
printf("** operating on count %d\n", i);
}
Re:On Secretly Terrible Engineers
by mattmanser on Monday March 09, 2015 @05:52PM
(#9174430)
No, because for most of those problems there's an easy alternative, declare another counter variable and you can just go:
z++;
if(z>100000) {
print x;
z=0;
}
A brief search on SO and lo and behold:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1504420/c-what-does-the-p...
Viewed 38,000 times. Every language probably has a similar question.
In reality you'd only use a mod operator if you were doing things like sorting into 4 columns or doing an operation on every 3rd thing. And it's not a concept that is introduced at school. Now I try to think of it, I think I only picked up mod when I was learning rounding in my first language and the man page happened to mention modulus at the same time.