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Quantify "well known". Historically enough variation existed in this area [1], and C only happened to copy FORTRAN's behavior for the sake of compatibility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulo#In_programming_language...

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Python does follow the convention, but what I am wondering now is why did FORTRAN break it ?

Fortran is old – 1958 onwards. It has precedence here, though at what point it separated the two behaviours into mod and modulo functions I don’t know.

Edit: From what I can tell, standardised in Fortran 90, presumably older than that.

My point is that Fortran doesn't have precedence on math, see this comment by Austin Feller :

http://python-history.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-pythons-integ...

Maybe because FORTRAN arrays index from 1 by default?

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