Why Python 3?

[Gregory Ewing]

Chris Angelico wrote:
> I'd rather have to explicitly request floating-point division;

When you write / in Python 3, you *are* explicitly requesting
floating-point division.

Similarly, when you write // you're explicitly requesting
integer division.

I don't see the problem. You write whatever you mean and it
does what you tell it to do.

> So either you keep a very close eye on everything to make sure you
> don't have floats infecting your calculations,

If you have something that works exclusively on ints and someone
passes you a float, and you don't check for that, you'll have
problems anyway even if no division is involved at all.

There's no way that Python 3 division can *introduce* a float
into an integer calculation unless you write / somewhere where
you really meant //. But that's the same kind of mistake as
calling foo() when you meant to call bar(). You can't blame
the language for that.

> but if you
> encode the date into the first eight digits, then put the store number
> in the next three, register number in the next three, and then the
> last three are sequential. Should work the same, right?)

It'll work fine as long as you use // when extracting the parts.
If you use / then you're *explicitly* saying to do the calculation
in floating point, which would not be a sane thing to do.

-- 
Greg