Query about mod operator

[Richard Gaskin]

There's a long-standing debate between engineers and people about 
whether computers should be made to think like humans or the other way 
around.

For microchip instruction sets I'll leave that debate to the pros in 
that field, but with high-level languages like Transcript I tend to 
favor people.

In a related discussion on the trunc function some time ago, I came up 
with this more reliable alternative:

function logicalTrunc n
   if n is not a number then return "NAN"
   get offset(".", n)
   if it > 0 then
      delete char it to -1 of n
   end if
   return n
end logicalTrunc

....which Kay C. Lan made more efficient with:

function anotherLogicalTrunc n
   if n is not a number then return "NAN"
   set the itemDelimiter to "."
   return item 1 of n
end anotherLogicalTrunc

Similarly, it seems we could do something like this for mod:

function logicalMod n
   set the itemdel to "."
   get item 2 of n
   if it is empty then return 0
   else return it
end logicalMod

Where would this fail?

And should we expect a high-level language to return results like this 
from the engine directly, or is there some benefit to having illogical 
byproducts of microchip design as our result that I'm not understanding?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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