[Tutor] from __future__ import division

[Steve Willoughby]

Dinesh B Vadhia wrote:
> I spent fruitless hours trying to get a (normal) division x/y to work and then saw that you have to declare:

normal division x/y works just as expected, with one caveat: remember
that if you divide two *integer* values, you will get an *integer*
division operation yielding an *integer* result.  So:

1.0 / 2.0 --> 0.5
1.0 / 2   --> 0.5
1 / 2.0   --> 0.5
1 / 2     --> 0

So if you make sure at least one operand is a real number you'll get
a real result.  This is now division works in many programming languages
including C and C++.

In the future, Python will switch to always yielding a real result,
and to force an integer division operation you use the special "//"
integer division operator.  If you want that behavior now, just
import that "from the future":

from __future__ import division

now:

1 / 2 --> 0.5
4 / 2 --> 2.0
1 // 2 --> 0
4 // 2 --> 2

HTH HAND

>> from __future__ import division
> 
> .. at the top of a module file.  What is this all about?
> 
> Dinesh
> 
> 
> 
> 
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