On Wed, Oct 23, 2019, at 19:00, Christopher Barker wrote: > On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 12:52 PM Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas > <python-ideas@python.org> wrote: > > The main problem is that a str is a sequence of single-character str, each > > of which is a one-element sequence of itself, etc. forever. If you wanted > > to change this, I think it would make more sense to go the opposite way: > > leave str a sequence, but make it a sequence of char objects. (And > > likewise, bytes and bytearray could be sequences of byte objects—or just go > > all the way to making them sequences of ints.) And then maybe add a c > > prefix for defining char constants, and you’ve solved all the problems > > without having to add new confusing methods or properties. > > I've thought for a long time that this would be a "good thing". the > "string or sequence of strings" issues is pretty much the only > hidden-bug-triggering type error I've gotten since "true division". > > The only way we really live with it fairly easily is that strings are > pretty much never duck typed -- so I can check if I got a string, and > then I know I didn't get a sequence of strings. But I've always > wondered how disruptive it would be to add a char type -- it doesn't > seem like it would be very disruptive, but I have not thought it > through at all. And I'm not sure how much string functionality a char > should have -- probably next to none, as the point is that it would be > easy to distinguish from a string that happened to have one character.
There's lots of functionality that's on str that if I were designing the language I'd put on character. character type functions are definitely in - and, frankly, str.isnumeric is an attractive nuisance, it may well make sense to remove it from str and require explicit use of all(). upper/lower is tricky - cases like ß can change the length of a string... maybe put it on char but return a string? No reason not to allow + or * to concatenate chars to each other or to strings, multiply a char to a string _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/OD5B2OOVMZ46RURZCMYFHQ7GSUPXVS5F/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
