Thanks Cliff. Not to belabor this point - clearly it's just something I'll have to get used to - but isn't the choice of the "+" as the concatenation operator part of the problem here? A more "explicit" choice would have been an "append()" function, would it not? Or at least a non-ambiguous character.
Obviously python *does* know that I'm concatenating, not adding, due to the type of the LH object, and it would save me a lot of time if I didn't have to explicitly convert my objects to strings. Any rule can be abused... - Michael "J. Clifford Dyer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 07:15:06AM -0800, Michael Pelz Sherman wrote regarding why no automatic conversion in string concatenation?: > > As a Java & PHP developer, I find it kind of annoying that I have to > explicitly convert non-string variables to strings when concatenating > them, especially when python is quite capable of doing the conversion > automatically. > i.e.: > >>> myBool = True > >>> print myBool > True > >>> print "myBool is " + myBool > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "", line 1, in > TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'bool' objects > >>> print "myBool is " + str(myBool) > myBool is True > Can anyone explain why this is so? Because python doesn't know if '1' + 1 should equal 2 or '11' and would rather you mad that decision. Should it be different than 1 + '1'? or to put it more succinctly, because "explicit is better than implicit." In fact, I think it's more often the case that I have string data that I need to treat as integers than the other way around (input from stdin and textfiles for example). > Are there any plans to change this > in python 3000? I hope not, and I don't think so. > Thanks, > - Michael No problem. Cheers, Cliff
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