Floating point operations

[talonx]

Hello,
I have just started learning python, so please bear with me if my question sounds very basic. (Or please point me to a relevant forum in such a case)

Let's say I have the code

  	L = [1,2]
	average = (sum(L))/len(L)
	print average

The result is rounded off to 1, instead of 1.5 because of integer division.
So my question is, how do I explicitly declare that I want a variable to be of floating point type? If its a preassigned value, then I can say

 a = 0.5

But what about the case above? The only way I could think of is to say

	L = [1,2]
	average = (sum(L) * 1.0)/len(L)
	print average

Thanks in advance.
I am using Python 2.5 on WinXP.

[jlm699]

You could type cast into float like this:
[code=python]
>>> avg = (sum(L))/float(len(L))
>>> avg
1.5[/code]
When a float is used in division, the result is not rounded for integer division.

[talonx]

Thanks a lot for your help, jlm.