built-in pow() vs. math.pow()

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2023 at 08:13, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 17:31, Andreas Eisele <andreas.eisele at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I sometimes make use of the fact that the built-in pow() function has an optional third argument for modulo calculation, which is handy when dealing with tasks from number theory, very large numbers, problems from Project Euler, etc. I was unpleasantly surprised that math.pow() does not have this feature, hence "from math import *" overwrites the built-in pow() function with a function that lacks functionality. I am wondering for the rationale of this. Does math.pow() do anything that the built-in version can not do, and if not, why is it even there?
>
> It is useful for when you want the pure floating point power which has
> an approximately fixed computational cost (unlike integer powers).
> Perhaps it would have been better if it was named fpow similar to fsum
> vs sum.
>

It's called math.pow. That on its own should be a strong indication
that it's designed to work with floats.

ChrisA