On Feb 11, 1:38 pm, Duncan Booth <duncan.bo...@invalid.invalid> wrote: > Tim Chase <python.l...@tim.thechases.com> wrote: > > But perhaps Py3 changes evaluation, returning an complex number. > > Yes, the change is documented > athttp://docs.python.org/3.1/reference/expressions.html#the-power-operator > > If it is in any of the "What's new in Python x.xx" documents or in a PEP > somewhere I haven't spotted it.
Not in the 'what's new' documents, as far as I can tell, but this change was introduced as part of implementing PEP 3141. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3141/ Here's an extract from the PEP, describing the 'Complex' abstract base class: class Complex(Number): """Complex defines the operations that work on the builtin complex type. In short, those are: conversion to complex, bool(), .real, .imag, +, -, *, /, **, abs(), .conjugate(), ==, and !=. If it is given heterogenous arguments, and doesn't have special knowledge about them, it should fall back to the builtin complex type as described below. """ <snip lots of other abstractmethods here> @abstractmethod def __pow__(self, exponent): """a**b; should promote to float or complex when necessary.""" raise NotImplementedError -- Mark -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
