Vedran Čačić added the comment:

Yes, the mapping/sequence distinction was (at least declaratively) the reason 
the ABCs were introduced, but that isn't an obstacle here: whether a mapping or 
a sequence, it _is_ iterable, right?

---

In case anybody is interested, here's how I came to this problem: at a 
programming competition, I set a problem where contestants had to write some 
function, and I declared that "the function must work for arbitrary iterable 
(with some properties that currently don't matter)".

Then a big discussion ensued, with a big group of people thinking that classes 
with __getitem__ but no __iter__ don't quality (giving collections.abc.Iterable 
as an argument), and another big group of people thinking they do (giving EAFP 
as an argument: "look, I tried iterating, and succeeded").

Of course, it's an incredibly technical detail, but I don't like such gray 
areas. To me, things with __getitem__ are clearly iterable - the glossary says 
so:-). Iterable's instancecheck is simply buggy ("incomplete", if you want). 
There might be valid reasons for keeping it buggy, but they should be 
documented.

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue18558>
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