Feature #4831: Integer#prime_factors

• Status: Closed
• Assignee: yugui (Yuki Sonoda)
• Target version: -

[mame (Yusuke Endoh)]

Hello,

lib/prime provides Integer#prime_division, but I always forget the name.
I think that #prime_factors is more suitable. I'd like to hear opinions
of English natives. What do you think?

--
Yusuke Endoh [e-mail]

[drbrain (Eric Hodel)]

Yes, #prime_factors and #factors are synonyms.

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Status changed from Open to Assigned

[yhara (Yutaka HARA)]

• Target version changed from 2.0.0 to 2.6

[naruse (Yui NARUSE)]

• Target version deleted (2.6)

[yugui (Yuki Sonoda)]

I am not against adding such an alias but I'd like to think with more inputs. At this moment, I don't have strong reason to justify the name.

From a certain perspective, the alias is simply wrong because the method returns not only prime factors of the receiver but also their multiplicities -- i.e. the prime division of the receiver.
For me, 200.prime_factors sometimes looks to return (or yield) [2, 2, 2, 5, 5] as MATLAB does.

Mame, do you have any concrete examples which support your expectation to the return value? Or any suggestions from native English speakers or mathematicians?

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

• Status changed from Assigned to Closed

prime is already extracted from ruby repository to https://github.com/ruby/prime.

We should move to its place.