Inaccurate definition for Right Division Operator?

[goualard-f]

The documentation defines the Right Division Operator /(x,y) as the multiplication of x by the inverse of y on the right. Besides being strangely convoluted, I believe such a definition is also misleading. For floating-point values, the RightDivision Operator performs at most one rounding only, while the multiplication by the inverse might incur two roundings, leading to different results. Consider:

julia> 5/3
1.6666666666666667
julia> 5*(1/3)
1.6666666666666665

Am I missing something here? What are the considerations that led to such a definition in the first place?

[adienes]

that definition was probably written by someone who had recently taken an abstract algebra course but had not recently read the IEEE arithmetic spec

[Yiosko]

you're exactly right. The definition is conceptually motivated by algebra but does not faithfully describe the behavior of floating-point division. Your example shows this discrepancy well.