Data is all around us and the amount of data stored increases every single day. In today’s world, decisions must be data-driven and so it is imperative that we be able to process, analyze, and understand the data we collect. Other important factors include the security and privacy of data. Businesses and governments need to answer important questions such as “Where should this data be stored?”; “How should this data be stored?”; and even, “Should this data be stored at all?”. The answers to these questions for Health Canada and personal health data is very different from the answers Nintendo might come up with for the next Animal Crossing game. If decisions must be data-driven then computers are an excellent tool for processing that data, especially when we consider that computers are several orders of magnitude faster at computing with data than a human.
We begin our study of computer science in earnest by defining different categories of data, and seeing how to represent them in the Python programming language. In over the next three sections, we’ll review the common data types that we’ll make great use of in this course: numeric data, boolean data, textual data, and various forms of compound data that combine multiple pieces of data into a single entity. We’ll both discuss these data types independent of computers or programming language, and then learn about subtle, but crucial, differences between our theoretical conceptualizations of data and what can actually be represented in Python.
Given the amount and different varieties of data in the world, it is useful for both humans and computers to have ways to categorize data. A data type is a precise description of a category of data that contains two parts:
For example, we could say that a person’s age is a natural number, which would tell us that values like 25 and 100 would be expected, while an age of -2 or “David” would be nonsensical. Knowing that a person’s age is a natural number also tells us what operations we could perform (e.g., “add 1 to the age”), and rules out other operations (e.g., “sort these ages alphabetically”).
Importantly, these data types exist ouside of program languages—we’ve had natural numbers for much, much longer than we’ve had computers, after all! At the same time, every programming language has a way of representing data types, so that programs can differentiate between data of various types when performing computations. So in this section, we’ll present both abstract versions of common data types (sometimes called abstract data types), which are independent of programming language, and the corresponding concrete data types that existing in the Python programming language. Many terms and definitions may be review from your past studies, but be careful—they may differ slightly from what you’ve learned before, and it will be important to get these definitions exactly right.
We’ll start with two of the most common forms of numeric data, which represent numbers that have no fractional component:
Of course, the natural numbers are a subset of the integers: every
natural number is an integer, but not vice versa. The Python programming
language defines the data type int to represent natural
numbers and
integers. You might wonder why we care about natural numbers at
all, and why we don’t just talk about integers like Python seems to. The
answer is that it is often useful to consider only integers that are
\(\geq\) 0, and so we define a special
name for that category of integer. In Python, an int
literal is simply the number as a sequence of digits with an optional
- sign, like 110 or -3421.
>>> 110
110
>>> -3421
-3421All integers support the familiar arithmetic operations: addition (\(4 + 5\)), subtraction (\(4 - 5\)), multiplication \(4 \times 5\)), exponentiation (\(4^5\)). They also support division, but that’s a special case we’ll discuss in more detail down below.
One additional arithmetic operation that may be less familiar to you is the modulo operation, which produces the remainder when one integer is divided by another. We’ll use the percent symbol \(\%\) to denote the modulo operation, writing \(a~\%~b\) to mean “the remainder when \(a\) is divided by \(b\)”. For example, \(10~\%~4 = 2\) and \(30~\%~3 = 0\).
Now, Python! It should not be surprising that the Python programming language supports all of these arithmetic operations, using various operators that mimic their mathematical counterparts:
>>> 2 + 3
5
>>> 2 - 5
-3
>>> -2 * 10
-20
>>> 2 ** 5 # This is exponentiation, "2 to the power of 5"
32
>>> 10 % 4
2In the second-last prompt, we included some additional text:
# This is exponentiation, "2 to the power of 5". In Python,
we use the character # in code to begin a
comment, which is code that is ignored by the Python
interpreter. Comments are only meant for humans to read, and are a
useful way of providing additional information about some Python code.
We used it above to explain the meaning of the **
operator.
Python supports the standard precedence rules for arithmetic operations,sometimes referred to as “BEDMAS” or “PEMDAS” performing exponentiation before multiplication, and multiplication before addition and subtraction:
>>> 1 + 2 ** 3 * 5 # Equal to "1 plus ((2 to the power of 3) times 5)"
41Just like in mathematics, long expressions like this one can be hard to read. So Python also allows you to use parentheses to group expressions together:
>>> 1 + ((2 ** 3) * 5) # Equivalent to the previous expression
41
>>> (1 + 2) ** (3 * 5) # Different grouping: "(1 plus 2) to the power of (3 times 5)"
14348907When we add, subtract, multiply, and use exponentiation on two
integers, the result is always an integer, and so Python always produces
an int value for these operations. But dividing
two integers certainly doesn’t always produce an integer. This is fine
in mathematics, since we know how to represent fractions. But how does
this affect what Python does?
It turns out that Python has two different division operators. The
first is the operator //, and is called floored
division (or sometimes integer division). For
two integers x and y, the result of
x // y is equal to the fraction \(\frac{\texttt{x}}{\texttt{y}}\),
rounded down to the nearest integer; this is also called the
quotient of dividing x by y.
Here are some examples in Python:
>>> 6 // 2
3
>>> 15 // 2 # 15 ÷ 2 = 7.5, and // rounds down
7
>>> -15 // 2 # Careful! -15 ÷ 2 = -7.5, which rounds down to -8
-8But what about “real” division to represent a statement like \(15 \div 2 = 7.5\)? This is done using the
exact division operator /:
>>> 15 / 2
7.5The output in this case is not an integer, but rather a
value of a different data type called float that Python
uses to represent arbitrary real numbers, including fractional values.
We’ll discuss fractional values more in a little bit, but first we’ll
wrap up our discussion of operations on numbers with the
comparison operators.
To help you review, here is a table summarizing the seven arithmetic operators we’ve seen in Python so far:
| Operation | Description |
|---|---|
a + b |
Produces the sum of a and b |
a - b |
Produces the result of subtracting b from
a |
a * b |
Produces the result of multiplying a by
b |
a / b |
Produces the result of dividing a by
b |
a // b |
Produces the quotient when a is divided by
b |
a % b |
Produces the remainder when a is divided by
b |
a ** b |
Produces the result of a raised to the power of
b |
When comparing two numbers, we have the standard mathematical symbols \(=\) and \(\neq\) for stating whether two numbers are equal or not, as well as the symbols \(<\), \(\leq\), \(>\), \(\geq\) to describe which of two numbers is larger.
As with arithmetic operations, each of these mathematical symbols has a corresponding Python operator:
| Operation | Description |
|---|---|
a == b |
Produces whether a and b are equal. |
a != b |
Produces whether a and b are not
equal (opposite of ==). |
a > b |
Produces whether a is greater than b. |
a < b |
Produces whether a is less than b. |
a >= b |
Produces whether a is greater than or equal to
b. |
a <= b |
Produces whether a is less than or equal to
b. |
Here are a few examples:
>>> 4 == 4
True
>>> 4 != 6
True
>>> 4 < 2
False
>>> 4 >= 1
TrueNow let’s talk about non-integer numbers. There are a few number sets that you will be familiar with from your earlier studies:
Python uses a separate data type called float to
represent non-integer numbers. A float literal is written
as a sequence of digits followed by a decimal point (.) and
then another sequence of digits. Here are some examples of
float literals:
>>> 7.5
7.5
>>> .123
0.123
>>> -1000.00000001
-1000.00000001From a mathematical standpoint, all of the arithmetic and comparison
operations we described for integers work with float values
as well. Here are some examples:
>>> 3.5 + 2.4
5.9
>>> 3.5 - 20.9
-17.4
>>> 3.2 > 1.5
True
>>> -3.2 > -1.5
False
>>> 3.5 / 2.5
1.4floatHere’s an interesting example. Recall that the square root of a number \(x\) is equal to raising \(x\) to the power of \(\frac{1}{2}\). Let’s see what happens if we use what we’ve learned to calculate the square root of 2 in Python:
>>> 2 ** 0.5
1.4142135623730951See the problem? \(\sqrt 2\) is an irrational number and its decimal expansion is infinite and non-repeating. But the Python interpreter, as a program run on your computer, has only a finite amount of computer memory to work with, and so cannot represent \(\sqrt 2\) exactly, just as you would not be able to write down all of the decimal places of \(\sqrt 2\) on any finite amount of paper. More precisely, computers use a binary system where all data, including numbers, are represented as a sequence of 0s and 1s. This sequence of 0s and 1s is finite since computer memory is finite, and so cannot exactly represent \(\sqrt 2\). We will discuss this binary representation of numbers later this year.
So the float value that the Python interpreter output,
1.4142135623730951, is an inexact approximation of \(\sqrt 2\). Let’s see what happens if we
take this number and square it:
>>> 1.4142135623730951 ** 2
2.0000000000000004Or, more dramatically (and practicing with our comparison operators):
>>> (2 ** 0.5) ** 2 == 2
False😔 This illustrates a fundamental limitation of float:
this data type is used to represent real numbers in Python programs, but
cannot always represent them exactly. Rather, a float value
approximates the value of the real number; sometimes that
approximation is exact, like 2.5, but most of the time it
isn’t.
ints and
floatsHere’s an oddity:
>>> 6 // 2
3
>>> 6 / 2
3.0Even though \(\frac{6}{2}\) is
mathematically an integer, the results of the division using
// and / are subtly different in Python. When
x and y are ints,
x // y always evaluates to an int,
and x / y always evaluates to a
float, even if the value of \(\frac{\texttt{x}}{\texttt{y}}\) is an
integer! So 6 // 2 has value 3, but
6 / 2 has value 3.0. These two values
represent the same mathematical quantity—the number 3—but are stored as
different data types in Python, something we’ll explore more later in
this course when we study how ints and floats
are stored in computer memory.
However, even though 3 and 3.0 are of
different data types, Python does recognize them as having equal
values:
>>> 3.0 == 3
Trueints and floatsSo to summarize: for two ints x and
y, all of the expressions x + y,
x - y, x * y, x // y,
x % y, and x ** y produce ints,
and x / y always produces a float. For two
floats, it’s even simpler: all seven of these arithmetic
operations produce a
float.Even //. Try it!
But what happens when we mix these two data types? An arithmetic
operation that is given one int and one float
always produces a float. Even in long arithmetic
expressions where only one value is a float, the whole
expression will evaluate to a
float.This is true even when the resulting value is
mathematically an integer, as shown in this example.
>>> 12 - 4 * 5 // (3.0 ** 2) + 100
110.0