@MartinEnder It seems mathematically cleaner to me, if you think what happens when you remove the first "digit" in the base b
representation of n
. In the scheme where negative numbers have all digits negative, this means you get rem n (b^k)
for some k
(in Haskell syntax), and in the scheme where the first digit is negative, you get mod n (b^k)
. And mod
is nicer than rem
.