Usually operations on Rational numbers don’t return references to their arguments:
julia> d = Rational{BigInt}(2)
2//1
julia> d.num === (1*d).num
false
julia> d.num === (0+d).num
false
I assumed that this holds in general, but I was wrong:
julia> d.num === inv(d).den
true
It turns out that inv(::Rational) returns the exact same numerator and denominator objects, just switched around in the Rational object: julia/rational.jl at master · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub
Sometimes this distinctions is irrelevant, but this behavior was quite a head-scratcher for sure while writing some code making use of MutableArithmetics.jl. An example of unexpected behavior:
julia> a = Rational{BigInt}(2)
2//1
julia> b = inv(a)
1//2
julia> using MutableArithmetics
julia> zero!!(a)
0//1
julia> b # mutating a also mutates b!
1//0
Perhaps inv should be changed so as to copy the numerator and denominator, instead of returning references to the input value, for consistency with the other operations? I know this would cause some pain for more basic use-cases, though…
Maybe it would be best to keep the current behavior, but document it somehow?