Why is the behavior of the modulo operator (%) different between C and Ruby for negative integers?

Question

I was running some code in here. I tried -40 % 3. It gives me the output 2. when I performed the same operation in C, I get:

int i          


        

Answer 1

In Java and C, the result of the modulo operation has the same sign as the dividend, hence -1 is the result in your example.

In Ruby, it has the same sign as the divisor, so +2 will be the result according to your example.