Python 3, an Illustrated Tour Transcripts
Chapter: Numbers
Lecture: Division
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In this video we're going to talk about integer division. This came out in Python 3 PEP 238 introduced it.
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In Python 2 when you divided a number by another number if you divided floats, you'd get back a float as a result,
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but for integers, you would get back an integer as a result. And this is called floor division.
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Guido writes in his Python history blog about how this was a mistake and Python 3 attempted to rectify this
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by changing the behavior of the division operator. So in Python 3 slash does what's called true division there's a __truediv__
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and double slash does floor division __floordiv__ So if I divide 2 by 3 in Python 3, I get point .6666,
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and if I say 2//3 then I get that floor division and I get back 0 as a result. Note that floor division also works on floats
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if I say 2.0 divided by 3.1, I get .66, but if I do floor division on those numbers, I get 0.0 and because everything is an object in Python,
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if we want to we can go through the steps to show that you can invoke __truediv__ on an integer and __floordiv__ as well.
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Now again, you typically don't do this, we typically don't call the dunder methods but they're there because in Python everything is an object
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and you can call the object methods if you want to. Quick summary, in Python 3 when you divide two numbers, you will get a float as a result.
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If you don't want a float then use a double divide to do what's called floor division.