Learn Enough Python to Be Dangerous: Software Development, Flask Web Apps, and Beginning Data Science with Python

Chapter 4

Other Native Objects

Now that we’ve taken a look at strings and lists (plus tuples and sets), we’ll continue with a tour of some other important Python features and objects: math, dates, regular expressions, and dictionaries.

4.1 Math

Like most programming languages, Python supports a large number of mathematical operations:

$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ python3
>>> 1 + 1
2
>>> 2 - 3
-1
>>> 2 * 3
6
>>> 10/5
2.0

Note that division gives you the answer that you’d expect:

>>> 10/4
2.5
>>> 2/3
0.6666666666666666

We see here that Python uses floating-point division by default. This stands in contrast to some other languages, such as C and Ruby, in which / is integer division that returns the number of times the denominator goes into ...