On Fri, 14 May 2021 at 20:06, Martin Teichmann
Also consider the section in the PEP format "How would we teach this?" How would you explain to someone with no programming background, maybe a high school student, that 3/4 and 3 / 4 mean different things in Python? Your audience might not even know that there is a difference between "fraction", "decimal" and "float" at this stage.
Well, I think a high school student would be the one with the least problems: s/he would just realize "wow, that thing can do fractions! I can do my math homework with that!" And I can tell you, kids will be the first ones to figure out that if you type spaces you get decimals, if you do not type spaces you get fractions. They are used to this kind of stuff from their math class, from calculators (or their phones, I guess).
OK, maybe I chose a bad example. Maybe I should have said "PL/SQL programmers who don't really understand much of the theory behind programming, but are just interested in getting the job done, who have picked up some Python code written by someone else and have to fix it because the automation script broke and the normal guy isn't in the office today". I can give you names, if you want :-)
So, if you show them (the following is fake)
>>> 1/2 + 1/3 5/6 >>>> 1 / 2 + 1 / 3 0.833333
They will immediately spot what's going on.
In effect you're saying "we don't need to teach it because it's obvious". I disagree. There's certainly some audiences who won't find it intuitive. How do we teach it to them? But I'm not really interested in going into ever more detail on this point to be honest. All I'm trying to say is "I think that having 1/2 mean something different than 1 / 2 is unacceptable, because it's too easy for people to misunderstand". You may choose to disagree with me, which is fine. But at some point, the responsibility has to be on you to persuade people that your idea is good, so you can't do that indefinitely. I'd still like to see a more precise explanation of your proposal. I'm finding that every time I try to guess details of what you mean, I'm guessing wrong, and that's not productive (for me or for you). Paul