[Python-Dev] return type of __complex__

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sun Oct 21 12:35:24 CEST 2012


On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 8:11 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> I'm also not sure why we have several variants of the power operator:
> **, built-in pow(), math.pow().

Built-in pow() is provided for efficient modular arithmetic (via the
3-argument "pow(x, y, z)" form that means "x ** y % z")

I don't know the rationale math.pow() though - it may just stem from
the time when the math module was just a really thin wrapper around
the underlying C library's floating point math support.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia


More information about the Python-Dev mailing list