fractions floats sometimes consistency floats always / / the designers of python decided that consistency of output was important and therefore because it might sometimes need to use float it should always use float note that even floating point numbers cannot exactly represent all fractions / can be precisely represented but / cannot we will return to the imprecision of floating point numbers when we look at them in detail (if you really want to stick to integers then python offers the "//operator which returns an integer answerrounded strictly down in case of fractional answers