Confusing math problem

[Schizoid Man]

"Oscar Benjamin" <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote in

> Then you want operator.pow:
>
>>>> import operator
>>>> operator.pow(3, 2)
> 9
>
> math.pow is basically the (double)pow(double, double) function from
> the underlying C library. operator.pow(a, b) is precisely the same as
> a**b.

So how is operator.pow() different from just pow()?

> There's no need to use strings if you're working with integers in
> Python. The results with int (not float) will be exact and will not
> overflow since Python's ints have unlimited range (unless your machine
> runs out of memory but that only happens with *really* big integers).

Yes, that's the idea. I haven't really used Python before, so was just 
kicking the tyres a bit and got some odd results. This forum has been great 
though.

> If you want to do computations with non-integers and high precision,
> take a look at the decimal and fractions modules.
> http://docs.python.org/2/library/decimal.html
> http://docs.python.org/2/library/fractions.html
>
> There is also a good third party library, sympy, for more complicated
> exact algebra:
> http://sympy.org/en/index.html

Thanks a lot for the references, I'll definitely check them out.