I was asked again today to explain why integer division in python returns the floor of the result instead of truncating towards zero like c.
Python floor division negative numbers.
Python s default division of integers is return the floor towards negative infinity with no ability to change that.
Tim peters who knows where all python s floating point skeletons are buried has expressed some worry about my desire to extend these rules to floating point modulo.
Floor division with operator note.
5 2 2 but if one of the operands is negative the result is floored i e rounded away from zero towards negative infinity.
The rounding towards zero behavior was deprecated in python 2 2 but remains in python 2 7 for the sake of backward compatibility and was removed in python 3.
For positive numbers there s no surprise.
The truncate towards negative infinity rule can cause precision loss for x 1 0 when x is a very small negative number.
Python 3 s approach provides a fractional answer so that when you use to divide 11 by 2 the quotient of 5 5 will be returned.
Mathematically python is not giving correct output for integer division for negative number e g.
Georg brandl georg brandl date.
To do round up division you would use.
But for floor division in python 2 int int int to understand m.
But with a negative number why does 6 4 return 2.
Floor division and modulo are linked by the following identity x x y y x y which is why modulo also yields unexpected results for negative numbers not just floor division.
In python 2 the quotient returned for the expression 11 2 is 5.
Python 2 s operator performs floor division where for the quotient x the number returned is the largest integer less than or equal to x.
7 2 3 but python is giving output 4.
To get a float result in python 2 without floor rounding we can specify one of the operands with the decimal point.
There are two types of division operations in python.
Ordinary division with operator 2.
Phyton python floor division operator python floor division example python floor the expression 6 4 yields 1 where floor division produces the whole number after dividing a number.
Division works differently in python 2 and 3.
You can read the bdfl s reason why.
