On 5/26/06, Andrew Harrington <aharrin@luc.edu> wrote:
As I gear up to write or translate lessons for Crunchy Frog, I would like feedback on one general issue: // -- the new integer division operator.
It's hardly new; it was introduced in 2.2.
// is already legal in Python 2.4, though / still means the same thing for integers. That is to change in Python 2.5, that is already in alpha 2: / as integer division will able to be set to mean the old operator or always mean real division (I forget which is the default in 2.5).
Where did you get this? / won't change its meaning until 3.0. Ever since 2.2 you can force it to mean real division by using "from __future__ import division".
I think this is an excellent change in Python. I would encourage using // for integer division in all newly written lessons.
Right. We've been encouraging this ever since 2.2.
There is the issue in 2.4 that you still have to go through an extra cast if you want real division, x = 5 y = 3 real_quotient = float(x)/y
but there is nothing for that at the moment
Unless you want to promote the __future__ statement above. But that's questionable for newbies -- it's better to teach the current language. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)