this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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I thought = was a mathematical operator, not a logical operator; why does Python use

>= instead of >==, or <= instead of <==, or != instead of !==?

Thanks in advance for any clarification. I would have posted this in the help forums of FreeCodeCamp, but I wasn't sure if this question was too.......unspecified(?) for that domain.

Cheers!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Imagine saying these operators out loud.

> is "is greater than"

So it makes sense to use >= as "is greater than or equal to"

You'd think = would be "is equal to", but it's already used for "set equal to" (i.e., assignment).

So what symbol do we use for "is equal to"? The symbol used in many programming languages is ==, so Python chose to follow that convention.

It's worth noting that there are other languages that use = as "is equal to", and use something else for assignment (like := for example). It just comes down to the history of the language and what conventions the original authors decided to use.

[–] FizzyOrange 11 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

>= and <= match the mathematical operators. The question you want to ask is why doesn't it use = for equality, and the answer is that = is already used for assignment (inherited from C among other languages).

In theory a language could use = for assignment and equality but it might be a bit confusing and error prone. Maybe not though. Someone try it and report back.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

I've written code before in some hardware-specific languages before (I think it was for programming a stepper motor or something?) that used = for both assignment and comparison. If I recall correctly, the language was vaguely C-like, but assignment was not permitted in the context of a comparison. So something like if( a = (b+c) ) would not assign a value to a, it would just do the comparison.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Rust does an interesting thing in this regard. It does still have == for checking if two values are equal, but well, it actually doesn't have a traditional assignment operator. Instead, it has a unification operator, which programmers usually call "pattern matching".

And then you can use pattern matching for what's effectively an assignment and to some degree also for equivalence comparison.
See a few examples here: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=1268682eb8642af925db9a499a6d587a

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It would be confusing and weird if "=" did different things depending on the context.

= is the assignment operator

== is the comparison operator.

the others using = only is probably just to keep things short, and the fact that the context is a lot clearer with another character like < next to the =

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Pascal uses = for comparison (and := for assignment), which confused the fuck out of me when I switched to C.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Some people in mathematics use := to assign functions, like f(x) := x^2; then when evaluating the function you use f(2) = 4, because it can be ser as a "true" comparison

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I've never seen that, even in university, and it would be equally as confusing without explanation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

I only remember two of my professors using it, and I has to ask the first one what that mean and explain to my classmates on the second one.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

It’s all convention coming from older programming languages, particularly C, which comes from programmers wanting shorthand for things like β€œBRANCH_EQUAL $1 $2 $3” which is shorthand for some binary code.

Python has changed the logical and and or operators to be and and or instead of && and ||.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

It's a convention set by early programming languages.

In most C-like languages, if (a = b)... is also a valid comparison. The = (assignment) operation returns the assigned value as a result, which is then converted to a boolean value by the if expression. Consider this Javascript code:

let a = b = 1
  1. It first declares the b variable and assigns it the value of the expression 1, which is one.
  2. It returns the result of the expression b = 1, which is the assigned value, which is 1.
  3. It declares the a variable and assigns the previously returned value, which is 1.

Another example:

let a = 1
let b = 2
let c = 3
console.log(a == b) // prints "false" because the comparison is false
console.log(a = b) // prints 2 because the expression returns the value of the assignment, which is 'b', which is 2

// Using this in an 'if' statement:
if (b = c) { // the result of the assignment is 3, which is converted to a boolean true
    console.log("what")
}

You can't do the same in Python (it will fail with a syntax error), but it's better to adhere to convention because it doesn't hurt anyone, but going against it might confuse programmers who have greater experience with another language. Like I was when I switched from Pascal (which uses = for comparison and := for assignment) to C.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

With python you can use the := to assign and return new value.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

Walrus operator my beloved

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

If I were to speculate, I'd say it came from the == operator (Boolean equality comparison) and then later, when that was extended to include Boolean less-than-or-equal and greater-than-or-equal, the decision was made to keep them 2 characters long. Either because it was visually cleaner, or just because programmers love being lazy (read: efficient)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago

It's still a mathematic operator. There's an entire field of math dedicated to comparisons, and it's featured heavily in most programming languages. Computer science is a field dedicated to the application of math

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

<= is already no mathematical assignment operator, but a comparison operator. Thus there is no need to define e.g. <== for comparing two values.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Pretty sure this is directly inspired by C so I would guess Guido van Rossum (the author of Python) just used what was already common back then. As in, = is assignment operator and == is equality/comparison operator.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/operator_comparison

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

I get your point of view, and haven't thought about it that way before.

As for why it's like that, my best guess is the sentence I wrote above. Your proposal totally makes sense.