On Sun, 15 Nov 2015 01:23 pm, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 1:08 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> > wrote: >> number = +raw_input("enter a number: ") >> >> versus: >> >> text = raw_input("enter a number: ") >> try: >> number = float(text) >> except ValueError: >> number = int(text) > > What kinds of strings can float() not handle but int() can,
Heh, I think I got the order of them backwards. You should try to convert to int first, and if that fails, try float. > and in a > program that's going to group floats and ints together as "numbers", > will they ever be useful? I'd be more likely to write this as simply: Obviously this code assumes you want to distinguish between ints and floats for some reason. In Python, unlike Lua, Javascript and a few others, we do distinguish between ints and floats. Since they have different capabilities, that may sometimes be useful: py> 10.0 ** 400 Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> OverflowError: (34, 'Numerical result out of range') py> 10 ** 400 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000 -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list