Guido van Rossum wrote: > On 4/17/06, Ian Bicking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>The proposal wasn't to remove iterability in general, only to require >>the use of an explicit method when iterating over strings. It's not a >>huge change by any means; a speed bump for a small number of people, >>perhaps, but no real functionality would be removed. Backward >>compatibility is also certainly a concern -- and what seems to have >>soured Guido on the idea as much as anything -- but that doesn't seem to >>be what has you bothered. > > > "A speed bump for a small number of people"? "No real functionality > remove"? You gotta be kidding. It drops polymorphism between strings > and other sequences. This is not just of theoretical value -- difflib > relies on this, for example. Your (earlier) assertion that the stdlib > is atypical is wishful thinking; the stdlib contains lots of code just > like code written by regular people. Perhaps you've had Perl on your > mind too much recently?
Polymorphism between things that aren't similar is bad; in another context it is called implicit coersion, like '1'+2=='12'. That's what string iteration looks like to me -- strings aren't sequences of strings. It can be convenient to treat them like sequences, but lots of things can be convenient, including '1'+2=='12'. But I can accept and understand that the change introduces too many backward compatibility problems, especially subtle ones like removing type equivalencies, which can be very hard to detect or resolve. -- Ian Bicking / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / http://blog.ianbicking.org _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
