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Confused about logical operators (i.e. "comparison operators", or "boolean operators") in Python
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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!
ย
Edit: I think I get it now! Thanks so much to everyone for helping, and @FizzyOrange@programming.dev and @itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone in particular! ^_^
>=and<= match the mathematical operators. The question you want to ask is why doesn't it use=for equality, and the answer is that=is already used for assignment (inherited from C among other languages).In theory a language could use
=for assignment and equality but it might be a bit confusing and error prone. Maybe not though. Someone try it and report back.Rust does an interesting thing in this regard. It does still have
==for checking if two values are equal, but well, it actually doesn't have a traditional assignment operator. Instead, it has a unification operator, which programmers usually call "pattern matching".And then you can use pattern matching for what's effectively an assignment and to some degree also for equivalence comparison.
See a few examples here: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=1268682eb8642af925db9a499a6d587a
This reminds me on the niche tool in Mathematica I've been using, which has four different assignment oparators for that purpose.