1 Simpler Than C++ & Java

To prompt the user for input Python, one need only use the input function, e.g.,

def main():

    color = input("Enter your favorite color: ")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Both C++…

int main(const int argc, const char* const* argv)
{
    std::string color;
    
    std::cout << "Enter your favorite color: "
    std::cin >> color;

    return 0;
}

and Java…

    public static void main(String... args)
    {
        Scanner inputStream = new Scanner(System.in);
        String color = null;

        System.out.print("Enter your favorite color: ");
        color = inputStream.next();
    }

require more steps.

2 Only Strings?

You are probably a bit concerned that I only demonstrated how to retrieve user input as a string. In Python (similar to Java and Rust), all user input is read in as a string that we then convert. C++ is a bit more interesting with its Stream Extraction Operator (operator>>).

Consider the following code snippet.

def main():

    price = input("What is the price of your favorite lunch? ")
    frequency = input("How many times a week do you have that lunch? ")

    price = float(price)
    frequency = int(frequency)

    print(f"On average you spend {price * frequency:.2f}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Python actually lets us change the type of a variable… so price can start off as a str before be replaced with its parsed float value. We can actually simplify the code…

def main():

    price = float(input("What is the price of your favorite lunch? "))
    frequency = int(input("How many times a week do you have that lunch? "))

    print(f"On average you spend {price * frequency:.2f}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

We do not need to store the raw string values. We can (and in this case) should convert them immediately.

3 Computation in the Output

I bet that you found the output statement (at least) a little surprising.

    print(f"On average you spend {price * frequency:.2f}")