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Ruby Ruby Basics (Retired) Ruby Numbers Multiplication and Division

Tucker Sowers
Tucker Sowers
4,539 Points
Posted by Tucker Sowers
Tucker Sowers
4,539 Points

Why is 8/5 = 1? I am guessing ruby is rounding, but this was not discussed. Thank you.

Why is 8/5 = 1? I am guessing ruby is rounding, but this was not discussed. Thank you.

1 Answer

Jonathan Chua
Jonathan Chua
4,136 Points
Jonathan Chua
Jonathan Chua
4,136 Points

You are using integers (whole numbers) in your equation, so Ruby automatically outputs an integer. An easy way to get a float (decimal number) is to change one of the numbers to a float. For example: 8.0.

Tucker Sowers
Tucker Sowers
4,539 Points
Tucker Sowers
Tucker Sowers
4,539 Points

This makes a lot of sense. Funny that no one mentioned that. Thank you very much.

Kyle Meyer
Kyle Meyer
5,459 Points

Jonathan is correct. Since everything in Ruby is an object, what's happening is that you're calling the / (divide) method on 8, which is a Fixnum (aka an integer). That method looks to see if you're passing in another class of number with higher precision (like a Float), and returns that higher precision number.

Likewise, if you called 8.0 / 5, you're calling the / (divide) method on 8.0 which is a Float. Since you're passing in 5 as the first parameter, it's going to do Float based math by default.