Joe Mosby's blog

Exploring the __future__ module and learning about division


layout: post title: Exploring the future module and learning about division tags: code


Python adds new features to the language all the time, but occasionally those features are completely incompatible with existing features of the language. In many cases, they completely rewrite a core built-in function or key operator of the language. The __future__ module contains several of those new features - some of which have already made it into Python 2.7 at the time of this writing. A few of them are designed to prepare Python 2.x users for sea changes coming with Python 3.x.

The print() function is one of those new features. In 2.x, the print statement allowed developers to print to stdout, but it wasn't very robust. If you wanted to print to a different output, or rewrite part of how print formats its output, you just couldn't. print was too hard-coded into the syntax of how Python worked. By changing it into a function, though, we can change the separators, add different ends, or output to a file.

The print() syntax looks like this, as specified in PEP 3105:

def print(*args, sep=' ', end='\n', file=None)

And we can experiment with it like this:

from __future__ import print_function

print('Next level printing with print()')
print('Can\'t do this any more: print "Hello World!"')
print('Have to use print("Hello World!")')
print("Hello", "world", sep="-", end="flipper\n")

Cool, no? Though syntactically it's a big mental shift from the current print, it's unquestionably much more robust.

Python 3.x also brings in a new mechanism for handling division. Python 2.x used something called "floor division" when the / operator was called. It would divide and then discard the remainder and round downward to yield an integer, so "8/7" would yield "1" rather than "1.142857...". By bringing in Python 3.x's version of division, 8/7 will yield the float. 8//7 will bring in the old floor division.

from __future__ import division, print_function
print('8/7:', 8/7)
print('8//7', 8//7)

And finally, Python has even included an Easter egg for those developers who love and miss C's mechanism for separating code blocks using braces instead of whitespace:

from __future__ import braces

:)