TypeError: 'float' object not callable

Question

Why does the following generate the TypeError: 'float' object not callable?

sum([-450.0,950.0])

Answer 1

It looks like you happen to assign to a variable named sum in the same scope as the call above, thereby hiding the builtin sum function.

Answer 2

This problem happened for me as well. And I did not create any variable with 'sum' name. I solved the problem by changing 'sum' function to 'numpy.sum'.

Answer 3

This saved me too, as pnz showed above. I was racking my brains trying to figure out why 'sum' wasn't working. It wasn't called anywhere else in my script, and resolved by using 'numpy.sum'. Seems like default 'sum' doesn't work well with a list of floats.

This failed: xlist = [1.5, 3.5, 7.8] print(sum(xlist))

This worked: xlist = [1.5, 3.5, 7.8] print(numpy.sum(xlist))

Answer 4

#import builtins

numbers = [1,2,3,4,5,1,4,5]

total = builtins.sum(numbers)