# wyc's domain

## Haskell: divMod and quotRem Differences

Posted on October 1, 2017

divMod is integer division and modulo that truncates towards negative infinity, while quotRem is integer division and modulo that behaves like C-style operators which truncate towards zero.

Here’s a visualization that may help explain their differences.

We’ll first divide 5 by 2 step by step.

steps | value
------+-------
0  |   5
1  |   3
2  |   1  # 5 divMod 2 == 5 quotRem 2 == (2, 1)

The values are the same in this example. However, we now divide 5 by -2 step by step.

steps | value
------+-------
0  |   5
-1  |   3
-2  |   1  # quotRem stops here. 5 quotRem (-2) == (-2, 1)
-3  |  -1  # divMod stops here. 5 divMod (-2) == (-3, -1)

One more example, -14 divided by 5.

steps | value
------+-------
0  | -14
-1  |  -9
-2  |  -4  # quotRem stops here. (-14) quotRem 5 == (-2, -4)
-3  |   1  # divMod stops here. (-14) divMod 5 == (-3, 1)

quotRem “stops” as soon as the remaining value is less in magnitude than that of the divisor.

divMod will happily “cross” its value past zero for the final step, if it will help move the total number of steps towards negative infinity.

For more information see section 6.4.2 of The Haskell 98 Report.