On Jan 25, 2008 8:27 PM, Neil Toronto
Isn't it?
Python 3.0 integers are just integers. Now ceil and floor return ints from float arguments. It seems like things are moving closer to just having a single "number" type. For most applications, because of duck typing, you'd never know or care whether you're punting a float, int, or complex number around, and you'd usually not care.
Why not just go whole-hog and unify them all?
Because you don't want floats to be accidentally used as list indices. And because range(0, 1, 0.1) would be poorly defined. And because you can't order complex numbers. For many purposes you never have to care about what kinds of numbers you're manipulating. But there are still plenty of cases where it does matter, and then the different types help. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)