Alex Martelli wrote:The need to check "is this thingy here string-like" is sort of frequent, because strings are sequences which, when iterated on, yield sequences (strings of length 1) which, when iterated on, yield sequences ad infinitum.
Yes, this characteristic of strings is unfortunate because it tends to make some degree of LBYLing unavoidable.
FWIW, the trick I usually use to deal with this aspect of strings in recursive algorithms is to check whether the current item of an iteration is the same object I'm iterating over; if so, I know I've descended into a string. It doesn't catch it on the first recursion level of course (unless it was a 1-character string to start with), but it's a quick-and-dirty way to EAFP such algorithms.
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