Chris Angelico wrote:
All other basic arithmetic operations on two numbers of the same type results in another number of that type. ... There's just one special case: dividing an integer by an integer yields a float, if and only if you use truediv. It sticks out as an exception.
I take your point, but I think this is a case where practicality beats purity by a large margin. The idea that arithmetic should always give a result of the same type is all very nice in theory, but it just isn't practical where division is concerned. The reason it doesn't work well is because of the automatic promotion of ints to floats when they meet other floats. This leads to a style where people often use ints to stand for int-valued floats and expect them to be promoted where necessary. Things would be different if ints and floats were completely separate types, like str and bytes, but that would be extremely inconvenient. I used a language like that once, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
