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!
Edit: I think I get it now! Thanks so much to everyone for helping, and @[email protected] and @[email protected] in particular! ^_^
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 =
Pascal uses
=for comparison (and:=for assignment), which confused the fuck out of me when I switched to C.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
I’ve never seen that, even in university, and it would be equally as confusing without explanation.
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.
That’s why I’m confused! It seems like it does!
If I were to write the code
it would execute as
40.But then the video turns around and says that == is equal to, not
=.