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 @FizzyOrange@programming.dev and @itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone in particular! ^_^

top 17 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 16 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

>= 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.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

It does still have a traditional assignment operator. You can assign values to mutable variables.

Also I would say let-binds are still pretty much assignment; they just support destructuring. Plenty of languages support that to some extent (JavaScript for example) and you wouldn't say they don't have assignment.

I don't think it affects the ability to overload = anyway. I think there aren't any situations in Rust where it would be ambiguous which one you meant. Certainly none of the examples you gave compile with both = and ==. Maybe there's some obscure case we haven't thought of.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

This reminds me on the niche tool in Mathematica I've been using, which has four different assignment oparators for that purpose.

[–] EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I think what I'm most confused about is I cannot for the life of me seem to wrap my head around the difference between "assignment" and "equality". They seem exactly the same to me: when a variable is assigned a value, it's equal to that value now.

Even if I were write the program

x = 20
print(x*2)

it would still print 40. Because x is equal to 20. Because it was assigned the value of 20.

Hell, I've even heard Dr. Severance say "equal to" in this context in earlier videos multiple times.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

They seem exactly the same to me: when a variable is assigned a value, it’s equal to that value now.

Yeah it's confusing because in maths they are the same and use the same symbol but they are 100% not the same in programming, yet they confusingly used the same symbol. In fact they even used the mathematical equality symbol (=) for the thing that is least like equality (i.e. assignment).

To be fair not all languages made that mistake. There are a fair few where assignment is like

x := 20

x &lt;- 20

which is probably the most logical option because it really conveys the "store 20 in x" meaning.

Anyway on to your actual question... They definitely aren't the same in programming. Probably the simplest way to think of it is that assignment is a command: make these things equal! and equality is a question: are these things equal?

So for example equality will never mutate it's arguments. x == y will never change x or y because you're just asking "are they equal?". The value of that equality expression is a bool (true or false) so you can do something like:

a = (x == y)

x == y asks if they are equal and becomes a bool with the answer, and then the = stores that answer inside a.

In contrast = always mutates something. You can do this:

a = 3
a = 4
print(a)

And it will print 4. If you do this:

a = 3
a == 4
print(a)

It will (if the language doesn't complain at you for this mistake) print 3 because the == doesn't actually change a.

[–] EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Ohhhhh! I think I get it now!

So == means "equals" and is a declaration of the state of things, while = means "assigned the value of` and is a command toward a certain state of things. A description vs an action. An observation of a thing as opposed to effecting that thing.

Is that about right?

[–] itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That's exactly it. Some languages (e.g. Rust) make it even more clear¹, by following math notation for assignment even closer:

let x = 5;

¹ simplified Rust a little bit, there's a bit more nuance

[–] EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Thanks so much to you and @FizzyOrange@programming.dev for helping! This has been driving me crazy for like 3-4 weeks now! >_<

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

Well == is a question or a query rather than a declaration of the state of things because it isn't necessarily true.

You can write

a = (3 == 4)

which is perfectly valid code; it will just set a to be false, because the answer to the question "does 3 equal 4?" is no.

I think you've got it anyway.

[–] GetOffMyLan@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

How would you check two variables have equal values without changing the value of one otherwise?

Assignment you are assigning a value to the left side. Equality you are checking if the left and right are equal.

It's "set equal to" Vs "is equal to" one is an operation the other is a condition.

[–] Avalokitesha@programming.dev 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

My logic was always, if == is equal, then for >= we replace one of the equal signs to denote that it doesn't have only be equal but can be both.

But that was probably also influenced by languages where == means the value is equal and === means value and type have to be equal for the comparison to be true. If you compare "5" and 5 in those languages, == will be true and === will be false, since one is a string and one is a number.

At the end of the day, those signs are arbitrary conventions. People agree on them meaning something in a specific context, and the same thing can mean different things in different contexts. A in English represents a different sound than A in Spanish, and sometimes even in other dialects of English. Thinking of out like that helped me to keep the conventions of different programming languages apart.

[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 2 weeks ago

Don't remember what language uses === to check if two objects have the same memory id assigned. Like a = 1, b= 1 would give true to a == b but false to a === b; while a = 1, b = a, would give true to both.

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Pretty sure this is directly inspired by C so I would guess Guido van Rossum (the author of Python) just used what was already common back then. As in, = is assignment operator and == is equality/comparison operator.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/operator_comparison

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

<= is already no mathematical assignment operator, but a comparison operator. Thus there is no need to define e.g. <== for comparing two values.

[–] iii@mander.xyz 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I get your point of view, and haven't thought about it that way before.

As for why it's like that, my best guess is the sentence I wrote above. Your proposal totally makes sense.

[–] subignition@fedia.io 1 points 2 weeks ago

If I were to speculate, I'd say it came from the == operator (Boolean equality comparison) and then later, when that was extended to include Boolean less-than-or-equal and greater-than-or-equal, the decision was made to keep them 2 characters long. Either because it was visually cleaner, or just because programmers love being lazy (read: efficient)