On Mon, 04 Jul 2005 15:35:56 +0100, Tom Anderson wrote: >>> Also, would it be a good idea for (-1.0) ** 0.5 to evaluate to 1.0j? It >>> seems a shame to have complex numbers in the language and then miss this >>> opportunity to use them! >> >> It's generally true in Python that complex numbers are output only if >> complex numbers are input or you explicitly use a function from the >> cmath module. [...] The presumption is that a complex result is more >> likely the result of program error than intent for most applications. >> The relative handful of programmers who expect complex results can get >> them easily, though. > > A reasonable presumption. > > I always got really wound up that the calculator i had at school had this > behaviour too, *even in complex number mode*! Come to think of it, i don't > think it could do roots of imaginary numbers at all. However, python is > not a calculator.
Of course it is :-) py> 1+2 3 It even works with complex numbers: py> print (-1+0j)**0.5 (6.12303176911e-17+1j) although you have to watch out for those rounding errors in floating point. py> import cmath py> cmath.sqrt(-1) 1j -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
