Integers and floats

The integer is another valuable data type that is frequently used—an integer is any whole positive or negative number. The float data type is similar, but allows us to use numbers requiring decimal-level precision. With integers and floats, we can use standard mathematical operations, such as: +, -, *, and /. These operations return slightly different results based on the object's type (for example, integer or float).

An integer uses whole numbers and rounding, for example dividing two integers will result in another whole number integer. However, by using one float in the equation, even one that has the same value as the integer will result in a float; for example, 3/2=1 and 3/2.0=1.5 in Python. The following are examples of integer and float operations:

>>> type(1010)
<class 'int'>
>>> 127*66
8382
>>> 66/10
6
>>> 10 * (10 - 8)
20 

We can use ** to raise an integer by a power. For example, in the following section, we raise 11 by the power of 2. In programming, it can be helpful to determine the numerator resulting from the division between two integers. For this, we use the modulus or percent (%) symbol. With Python, negative numbers are those with a dash character (-) preceding the value. We can use the built-in abs() function to get the absolute value of an integer or float:

>>> 11**2
121
>>> 11 % 2 # 11 divided by 2 is 5.5 or 5 with a remainder of 1
1
>>> abs(-3)
3

A float is defined by any number with a decimal. Floats follow the same rules and operations as we saw with integers, with the exception of the division behavior described previously:

>>> type(0.123)
<class 'float'>
>>> 1.23 * 5.23
6.4329
>>> 27/8.0
3.375