Note: The attached image is a screenshot of page 31 of Dr. Charles Severance’s book, Python for Everybody: Exploring Data Using Python 3 (2024-01-01 Revision).


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!

  • Avalokitesha
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    1 day ago

    My logic was always, if == is equal, then for >= we replace one of the equal signs to denote that it doesn’t have only be equal but can be both.

    But that was probably also influenced by languages where == means the value is equal and === means value and type have to be equal for the comparison to be true. If you compare “5” and 5 in those languages, == will be true and === will be false, since one is a string and one is a number.

    At the end of the day, those signs are arbitrary conventions. People agree on them meaning something in a specific context, and the same thing can mean different things in different contexts. A in English represents a different sound than A in Spanish, and sometimes even in other dialects of English. Thinking of out like that helped me to keep the conventions of different programming languages apart.

    • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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      9 hours ago

      Don’t remember what language uses === to check if two objects have the same memory id assigned. Like a = 1, b= 1 would give true to a == b but false to a === b; while a = 1, b = a, would give true to both.