In one of my assignments I came across a weird implementation, and I was curious if it's a bug or the designed behavior.
In Python 3, division by / returns a floating point number, and // means integer division and should return an integer. I've discovered though that if either of the values is a float when doing integer division, it will return a float.
Example:
# These all work as expected
10 / 2
-> 5.0
11 / 2
-> 5.5
10 // 2
-> 5
11 // 2
-> 5
# Here things start to get weird
10.0 // 2
-> 5.0
10 // 2.0
-> 5.0
11.0 // 2
-> 5.0
Is this supposed to behave this way? If so, why does it behave this way?
解决方案
From PEP-238, which introduced the new division (emphasis mine):
Semantics of Floor Division
Floor division will be implemented in all the Python numeric types,
and will have the semantics of:
a // b == floor(a/b)
except that the result type will be the common type into which a and
b are coerced before the operation.
Specifically, if a and b are of the same type, a//b will be of that type too. If the inputs are of different types, they are first
coerced to a common type using the same rules used for all other
arithmetic operators.
In particular, if a and b are both ints or longs, the result has the
same type and value as for classic division on these types (including
the case of mixed input types; int//long and long//int will both
return a long).
For floating point inputs, the result is a float. For example:
3.5//2.0 == 1.0
For complex numbers, // raises an exception, since floor() of a
complex number is not allowed.
For user-defined classes and extension types, all semantics are up to
the implementation of the class or type.
So yes, it is supposed to behave that way. "// means integer division and should return an integer" - not quite, it means floor division and should return something equal to an integer (you'd always expect (a // b).is_integer() to be true where either operand is a float).