Is the PEP238 change to division going into Python 3 as planned? I realise that the new integer division semantics have been available in "from __future__" for quite a few years now, but a warning might be appropriate now that Python 3 is in alpha. A lot of people have probably either forgotten, or else never knew about PEP238. The following wording is still included in the Python 2.5.1 documentation...
""" 3.1.1 Numbers The interpreter acts as a simple calculator: you can type an expression at it and it will write the value. Expression syntax is straightforward: the operators +, -, * and / work just like in most other languages (for example, Pascal or C); parentheses can be used for grouping. For example: >>> 2+2 4 >>> # This is a comment ... 2+2 4 >>> 2+2 # and a comment on the same line as code 4 >>> (50-5*6)/4 5 >>> # Integer division returns the floor: ... 7/3 2 >>> 7/-3 -3 """ Which is interesting, since neither Pascal nor C division works like that. Pascal has a separate 'div' operator for integer division. C and C++ compilers usually round toward zero IIRC, but the rounding direction is not defined in the standards. In any case, after the final adoption of PEP238, integer division in Python will generally return float results - not the rounded-to-floor integer results shown here. It might be worth brainstorming some contexts where problems are likely to occur, to help anyone trying to prepare for the change. My contribution to that would be any code that needs to partition lists into slices. The obvious cases - binary searching, sorting - are covered by libraries which should be used in preference to hand- written code, but this kind of thing can happen elsewhere. I have some code that organises a sorted list of data into a balanced tree as part of a code generation task, for example, which relies on floor division. Also, if money amounts are stored as integer numbers of pennies (which they often are, since floats represent approximate values) problems could occur with various calculations since multiplication by a fractional quantity is often represented as a multiplication followed by a division. For example adding 5% is equivalent to multiplying by 1.05, or to multiplying by 105 then dividing by 100. The latter idiom is often used to keep everything integer, which requires division results to be rounded. Use of the decimal module is probably a good idea for money amounts these days, of course. I've not used it myself but the whole point of a decimal number type would be to get exact results and the kind of rounding behaviour that accountants would expect. The real world fix would normally be to replace the / operator with //, though, in order to keep the old floor-division semantics. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
