What Is Up With The Numbers In Python?

Let’s uncover why the size of an integer in Python is at least 24 bytes

Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash

If you are a seasoned programmer then feel free to jump straight to the part called “The types of numbers in Python”, as the first part will probably not teach you a lot of new things. Otherwise, just keep reading.

Explicit and implicit types

Python is a super popular language, and one of the reasons for this is that you don’t have to think about different data types when coding in Python. Whereas in languages like, C, C#, and Java you have to specify what data type a variable is, in Python you can omit that and simply type the name of your variable and then you are good to go.

Weather you think that is a good thing or not is of course subjective. Some developers hate programming languages that are not strictly typed, because the lack of types increases the risk of creating vulnerable and unpredictable code, if you are not very careful and aware of what you are doing.

On the other hand, some developers really enjoy the writeability and readability that Python offers, because the syntax is less verbose.

In this post I would like to give you some more insight into how the numbers in Python work, and what is going on inside Python’s belly.

A consequence of implicit types in Python

I think that one of Python’s consequences of not having explicit types is that a lot of new users, (myself included until recently), are not really aware of what is going on behind the numbers that they create using the language. Let’s look at an example:

#Python
x = 42
y = 1.5

In the above code block we instantiate a whole number and a floating point number (number with a decimal point).

In a language like C the same code could look like this:

//C
int x = 42;
float y = 1.5;

As you can see, in C there is an explicit difference between the two variables and we have to specify that a floating point number is a float, and a whole number is an int.