And before you start to have flashbacks
to high school algebra,
I'm not talking about complex mathematical calculations.
We use numbers numbers
to store a person's high score in a game,
or even the number of likes on a picture.
Python treats numbers in a few different ways
depending on how they're being used
and the difference is largely based
on whether it's a whole or fractional one.
Let's look at a few examples.
We can use the command line for this
as we just want to do some basic math.
So let's go to the command line and start our Python prompt.
We'll start out easy, two plus three.
Let's try another one.
Two, asterisk and then three.
When we hit Enter, we get six.
An asterisk or star is used for multiplication in Python.
Let's go to another one.
This is used for exponents.
It's exactly the same as two times two, times two.
Let's try another one.
This is how we do division inside of Python.
Now, what if we didn't want to have a remainder
as a result of our division.
Then, we could take advantage of a separate operator
called the floor division operator.
Let's see that one now.
We'll use a three with a space and two forward slashes
and then our two.
This time, we only get one as a result.
And the converse is also available to you.
If you only wanted the remainder,
For that one, we're going to do five, the percent sign
This is going to give us two because three
only goes into five one time and has a remainder of two.
like 45,000, how does Python handle that?
Let's take a look.
We'll type 45,000 and then we're going to divide it by five.
Not what we were expecting.
That's because the use of the comma
really confused the Python interpreter.
So no matter how large the number is,
we use no commas when we're working with Python.
So let's try that again,
this time, we're going to remove the use of the comma.
45,000 divided by five and there you have it,
we get the answer that we were looking for.
Now, here's a table of the most common operators
that you'll work with.
So far, we've only been using whole numbers or integers
to do our calculations but in the real world,
fractional numbers are a daily part of our lives.
would you be okay if we just drop the 75 cents
and only paid you $24?
Of course not.
That extra 75 cents has value to you.
In some programming languages like JavaScript,
There's no distinction between numbers with
and without decimal places.
Whereas in most programming languages,
numbers with decimal places are considered special
and they're typically called floats.
A float is any number with a decimal point.
It's short for a floating-point number.
It's used for when more precision is required
like in the case of our hourly rate.
Let's look at how Python works with floats.
First, we're going to try 0.2 plus 0.3.
And when we hit Enter, we get 0.5.
We use two floats and we get back a float in our answer.
Let's try another one.
0.2 divided by 0.3.
Whoa, it's a huge number.
That's because Python tries to be as precise as possible.
You may notice lots of extra decimal places
when working with floats.
Just ignore them for now.
Later, we'll learn how to tweak it to our own liking.