Ronald Oussoren added the comment:

There's an annoyingly long discussion about sum() on python-ideas.

IMHO the documentation should mention, as it does now, that sum is intended to 
be used with a sequence of numbers even it does work with most objects that 
support the + operator (such as by implementing __add__). In particular, using 
sum with a sequence of lists or tuples is extremely inefficient.

The fact that sum({1:'a', 2: 'b'}) works is a side effect of the how python 
works with sequences and IMHO doesn't have to be documented in every function 
that accepts a sequence as an argument.

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nosy: +ronaldoussoren

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue18424>
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