integer >= 1 == True and integer.0 == False is bad, bad, bad!!!

[Ian Kelly]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> There is a horrible (IMO) thing that Perl, Lua, and Javascript all do,
> which is automatically convert strings to numbers, so "12"+3 = 15.
> Python has the good sense to throw a type error if you attempt such an
> addition, but it goes and converts various types to bool automatically,
> which is more Perl-like than I really enjoy.  In fact Python 3 added yet
> another automatic conversion, of int to float on division, so 1/2 = 0.5.
>
> Obviously it's a point in the design space where various decisions are
> possible, but I can get behind the "explicit is better than implicit"
> idea and say that none of those conversions should be automatic, and if
> 1/2 = 0 was confusing people in Python 2 enough to justify changing
> divison semantics in Python 3, the preferable change would be for int
> division to raise TypeError rather than quietly converting to float.

I don't think it's any more egregious than automatic conversions of
mixed-type expressions, such as 3 + 4.5.  If you don't want your ints
automatically converted to floats on division, then use the integer
division operator.  1 // 2 is still 0 in Python 3.

Cheers,
Ian