Jeff Shannon wrote: > One possibility I can think of would be Unicode. I don't think that > implicitly calling str() on > Unicode strings is desirable.
it's not. but you could make an exception for basestring types. > Of course, one could ensure that unicode.join() used unicode() and str.join() > used str(), but I > can conceive of the possibility of wanting to use a plain-string separator to > join a list that > might include unicode strings. yes. > Whether this is a realistic use-case it is. mixing 8-bit ascii strings with unicode works perfectly fine, and is a good way to keep memory use down in programs that uses ascii in most cases (or for most strings), but still needs to support non-ascii text. I've proposed adding a "join" built-in that knows about the available string types, and does the right thing for non-string objects. unfortunately, the current crop of py-dev:ers don't seem to use strings much, so they prioritized really important stuff like sum() and reversed() instead... </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
