> Ask a mathematician, and he'll say that they are the same. The > underlying concept of number treats 3 and 3.0 as the same thing (until > you get to some extremely hairy mathematics,
No, even naive non-mathematicians may tell you they're different. If you ask any reasonably competent (but non-programmer) sixth grader, they will tell you that 3/2 is "1 with a remainder of 1" (and we have to play scissor-paper-stone to decide who gets the last piece of hard candy), while 3.0/2 is "1.5" (and we split the third piece of cake in half with a fork).
Naive non-mathematicians may indeed tell you that they are different, but they are wrong. Hopefully most readers of this thread, if not professional mathematicians per se, are not naive. I am neither naive nor a mathematician by trade (though I have had healthy doses of maths of all sorts), but if you ask me what three divided by two is, I'll say one-and-a-half, every time, _unless_ you specify that the answer must be an integer, in which case I would answer, "One!" Ironically, since this is a Python list:
3/2 1.5
I have to be explicit to get integer division:
3//2 1
which is precisely my point