On 2/23/20 1:49 AM, Christopher Barker wrote:
I think that the "strings are an iterable of strings", i.e. an
iterable of iterables onto infinity... is the last remaining common
dynamic type issue with Python.
However, I'd like to see the "solution" be a character type, rather
than making strings not iterable, so iterating a string would yield
chars, and chars would not be strings themselves, and not be iterable
(or a sequence at all).
This would be analogous to other iterables -- they can contain
iterables, but if you keep iterating (or indexing), eventually you get
to a "scalar", non iterable value.
This works well, for, e.g. numpy, where each index or iteration
reduces the rank of the array until you get a scalar.
And we don't seem to have constant problems with functions that expect
an iterable of, say, numbers getting passed a single number and
thinning it's an iterable of numbers.
But, as stated by the OP, it'll be a long path to get there, so I
doubt it's worth it.
In any case, there should be some consensus on what the long term goal
is before we start proposing ways to get there.
-CHB
I would agree with this. In my mind, fundamentally a 'string' is a
sequence of characters, not strings, so as you iterate over a string,
you shouldn't get another string, but a single character type (which
Python currently doesn't have). It would be totally shocking if someone
suggested that iterating a list or a tuple should return lists or tuples
of 1 element, so why do strings to this? Why does string act
differently? I'm not sure, but I suspect it goes back to some decisions
in the beginning of the language.
Making strings non-iterable would be a major break in the language.
Making the results of iterating over a string not be a string, but a
character type that had most of the properties of a string, except it
could hold only a single character and wasn't iterable would break a lot
less. Probably the only way to see would be try implementing this on a
branch of the compiler, and see how many of existing libraries and open
source projects break due to this.
--
Richard Damon
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