# Revision history [back]

You're probably running an older version of Sage. For reasons I (famously) disagreed with, it used to be the case that gcd(2, 4/2) and your gcd(25,50/2) would return 1, because the second term is a rational, and the gcd of rationals was defined to be 1. I thought this was very silly, even though defensible.

After a long discussion on sage-devel (following my first ever post there!) and thanks to work by Simon King (trac # 10771), this is no longer the case, and your code seems to work:

sage: gcd_recur(50)
GCD of 15 and 50: 5
GCD of 15 and 25: 5
GCD of 15 and 25/2: 5/2
GCD of 15 and 25/4: 5/4
GCD of 15 and 25/8: 5/8
GCD of 15 and 25/16: 5/16


You're probably running an older version of Sage. For reasons I (famously) disagreed with, it used to be the case that gcd(2, 4/2) and your gcd(25,50/2) gcd(15,50/2) would return 1, because the second term is a rational, and the gcd of rationals was defined to be 1. I thought this was very silly, even though defensible.

After a long discussion on sage-devel (following my first ever post there!) and thanks to work by Simon King (trac # 10771), this is no longer the case, and your code seems to work:

sage: gcd_recur(50)
GCD of 15 and 50: 5
GCD of 15 and 25: 5
GCD of 15 and 25/2: 5/2
GCD of 15 and 25/4: 5/4
GCD of 15 and 25/8: 5/8
GCD of 15 and 25/16: 5/16