On Fri, May 14, 2021, 4:31 PM Jonathan Fine
>>> 1/2 + 1/3
5/6 >>>> 1 / 2 + 1 / 3 0.833333
I'm sighted. I can see the difference. I suspect a blind person using a screen reader would struggle a lot to spot the difference. (I don't know enough about screen readers to be sure.)
There's also the fact that approximately 50% of the Python code I've written will now be broken. If you reverse the meaning, it will be the complementary 50%. -100 on this idea. Actually, even though I suggested before that I liked `1F/3` before, or perhaps `1/3F` (or either with type coercion rules), I think I've gone to -0.5 for that also. Basically, the fact I can do (and often have done) this makes it needless: from fractions import Fraction as F x = F(1, 3) Yours, David... P.S. A very long time ago, Python only had floor division of ints. I wrote plenty of `1.0*x/y` code to work around that. It wasn't the worst thing, but I understand the convenience of promotion to float. However, the existing `/` was given a backwards incompatible meaning of "true division" and the new `//` operator took on floor division. I still believe that was the wrong way around. I thought the existing operator should keep the same meaning, and a new operator could mean something else. But so it goes; I adjusted, of course. Nowadays I remember the distinction by thinking of the first slash as division, and the second one as the "floor operator." It's a mnemonic, not the actual machinery, but it works for my brain.