On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:24:11 -0700, Carl Banks wrote: > On Sep 26, 8:20 am, Grant Edwards <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote: [..] >> So now I suppose "+" for string concatenation is a bad thing. > > Yes. It's not the end of the world, but a separate concatenation > operator would have been better. Then there's no temptation to special > case a failure of sum(list_of_strings), because it's not a sum any more.
I'll give you the case of sum, and I'll admit that I've often thought that concatenation should be written & rather than +, but I wonder how much difference it would really make? If we wrote s & t for concatenation instead of s + t, would people now be bitching that it uses the same operator as bitwise-and? If so, then we haven't gained anything, and the only thing that would satisfy such people would be for every function name and operator to be unique -- something which is impossible in practice, even if it were desirable. And if not, then ask yourself, why is it acceptable for bitwise-and and concatenation to share the same operator, but not for addition and concatenation? Is it just because addition is more common than bitwise- and? > As for repeat, I can't personally think of a time I ever repeated > anything but a single item, and that only rarely. It's not useful > enough to deserve its own syntax, and the language wouldn't have > suffered one bit if it had been a method of sequences. I disagree. I think that the ability to write: line = "-"*50 pays for everything. But I accept that this is a matter of opinion, and others may disagree. When you create your own language, feel free to do something different :) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
