Sebastian Berg wrote: > However, in the same code, often strings are actually not desired to be > handled as sequences. > I.e. some code uses strings as sequences of characters, but most code > probably uses the meaning that a string is a word, or sentence: the > individual character has no useful meaning on its own.
Humm... It is not a matter of how often. It about the underlying type of strings and the derived behaviour. In Python, they are immutable sequences of characters. It does matter if you use them as characters, as words, as bibles... If you have a list of integers, does it behave differently if it contains a few countries' GDP, the songs in each Metallica's LPs, or the first two hundred primes? No, it does not. It is a list, a sequence, and you can deal with that list in the same ways as you can deal with a string sequence. Because they are both collections. This is fine in most cases and I like to know when it is not. > you make it a property rather than a function, you could think about > also forcing string.chars[0] in the first case. And once again... which is the superiority of strings.chars[0] over strings[0]? Maybe I am dumb, but I can see the difference. > Coming from NumPy, there is a subtle spectrum: > > strings are primarily scalars for which sequence behaviour > is well defined and often convenient > lists/tuples are typical collections/sequences > NumPy arrays are more element focused than most collections > (operators modify the elements not the container). > Nice point. However, we are talking about Python, not NumPy. A nice solution for NumPy is not necessary a good one for Python. You can list lots of languages and libraries which do differently than Python but... it does not matter! The question is different: is it right that Python string are immutable sequences or not? Should we change this or not? Sorry, but to the date, I do not see any (Python) example that proves that Python strings need a change like this. We can discuss endless about strings nature and essence but, in my opinion, we need to focus on real code, on real flaws. Thank for your comments. _______________________________________________ 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/PE7Y4NNBVVNCF3KODF364RQGDCJG2EWG/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
