On 21 August 2013 17:21, <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 21, 2013, at 11:22, Eric V. Smith wrote:
Exactly. Here's an extreme case: Say I do an operation, unexpectedly get a negative number,
Why can that operation return a negative number instead of raising an exception in the situation where it would return a negative number? I mean, if you want to get your exceptions as early as possible, however unpythonic that may be, that's the next logical step. Why do we need an implicit* wall between real and complex numbers, but not between positive and negative numbers, or integers and floats?
Because people want to use positive and negative integers and floats much more often than they want to use complex numbers.
*as in "explicit is better than", as in check your results yourself.
I would say that using cmath.sqrt() is explicitly stating that you're interested in using complex numbers. Oscar