Reading the documentation

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 05:24 am, Stefan Ram wrote:

>   Is the output of »help(floor)« supposed to be a kind of
>   normative documentation, i.e., /the/ authoritative
>   documentation of »floor«?

No. The output of help() is intended as a short description of the function, not
the authoritative and complete documentation.

For that, see the docs in the website.

>   Is there any hint in the documentation about the type
>   expected of arguments in a call?
> 
>   Is a parameter name »x« (as used above) described
>   somewhere to express the requirement of a real number?

There are various weak conventions for variable names:

x, y - floats or other real values, occasionally anything at all;

i, j, k - integers

s - string, set

a, b, c - three variables of the same kind (e.g. three lists)

o, obj - arbitrary object

L - list

d - dict, occasionally Decimal

spam, eggs, cheese - Pythonic versions of foo, bar, baz


>   It seems, »real« means »int or float«. Is this meaning
>   of »real« documented somewhere?

See the documentation for the numeric tower.




-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.