On Sat, Oct 02, 2010 at 04:38:16AM +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > 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?
Possibly. It would depend on the fact if there are people in need for a class needs an operator that falls into the bitwise-and abstraction and an operator that falls into the concat abstraction. > 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. I doubt that. I have never heard anyone ask for a different symbol for integer and float addition. What I would prefer is a different name and operator for each kind of abstraction. -- Antoon -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
