Compare / and % with divmod

Generally, when we want to get a quotient and a remainder from a number divided by another number. We will use two arithmetic operators / and % to get them. However, you might not know some programming languages provider some functions like divmod in python that return the quotient and the remainder together. Let see both methods in the python code.

# method 1
quotient = 99 // 5 # // is Floor division which
remainder = 99 % 5

# method 2
quotient, remainder = divmod(99, 5)

Looks like method 2 is more elegant. At least, I like method 2 better. However, division and modulus are instructions that build in CPU and method 2 is a function provided by programming languages. Therefore, using method 1 should have better running performance, but we don’t know if we really evaluate them.

Compare to divmod in python

def method1(a, b):
    quotient = a // b
    remainder = a % b

    return (quotient, remainder)

def method2(a, b):
    return divmod(a, b)

Compare to System.Math.DivRem in C# 7.0

public static (int quotient, int remainder) Method1(int a, int b)
{
    int remainder = a % b;
    int quotient = a / b;

    return (quotient, remainder);
}

public static (int quotient, int remainder) Method2(int a, int b)
{
    int remainder;
    int quotient = Math.DivRem(a, b, out remainder);

    return (quotient, remainder);
}

This table are the results of calling each methods 100,000 times.

Looks the two methods don’t has much differences. I can use the method 2 on some things performance are not real core feature.

By the way, I just wonder the implement of divmod is might be a combination of two operators like is

def divmod(a, b):
    return (a // b, a % b)

see how to implement Division Algorithm in the wiki.